Low-Light Underwater Image Enhancement for Deep-Sea Tripod

• Main Authors: Yujie Li, Jianru Li, Yun Li, Hyoungseop Kim, Seiichi Serikawa
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2019-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Image enhancement; underwater imaging; low lighting; deep-sea
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8684941/

To monitor the sedimentary process and morphological evolution in the South China Sea, free-ascending deep-sea tripod (FDT) has been developed. This FDT was equipped with a deep-sea camera and landed on the sea floor at a depth of 2100 m. Although the FDT was equipped with an artificial light, the battery capacity limited the duration and intensity of light. Therefore, enhancing such low-illumination images to obtain clear visual effects is an important advancement for analyzing the geological evolution process. In this paper, an adaptive bright-color channel-based low-light underwater image-enhancement method and a denoising method are proposed to enhance such images and remove noise and artifacts. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method outperformed state-of-the-art methods.