A Hybrid Approach with CLAHE and Dark Channel Prior for Enhancing Underwater Images
1Electronics and Communication Engineering, Aditya University, Aditya Nagar, ADB Road, 533437, Surampalem, India
2Electronics and Communication Engineering, Aditya University, India
3Electronics and Communication Engineering, Raghu Engineering College, India
4Electronics and Communication Engineering, GMR Institute of Technology, India
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed:
E-mail: lalithanarla.ece@gmail.com (VLN)
E-mail: lalithanarla.ece@gmail.com (VLN)
Received: March 17, 2025 | Revised: July 01, 2025 | Accepted: August 15, 2025 | Published: September 2025
Abstract
The underwater images (UIM) are rigorously degraded by colour deviations, scattering, and absorption. This can be addressed by enhancing the UIM. Prior knowledge of the degradation model is combined with enhancement methods to achieve superior performance. We have used a hybrid approach that incorporates the White Balancing (WB) technique for colour correction, CLAHE for enhancing contrast, and the Dark Channel Prior (DCP) method to decrease haziness in the image. Firstly, the UIM is colour corrected using WB. CLAHE is applied on a white-balanced image. DCP is also applied on white-balanced images to remove haziness. Finally, CLAHE output and DCP output are fused at a multi-scale by considering different weight maps to obtain the enhanced UIM. The U45, RUIE, and UIEB datasets are used to validate the effectiveness of the devised technique. A comparison of the developed technique with current methods reveals that the developed technique is superior.
Keywords
contrast enhancement ; image enhancement ; color correction ; de-haziness ; underwater image ; life underwater
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