Image Enhancement of Underwater Images using Deep Learning Techniques

Abstract

The quality of underwater images is very important for research purpose and ocean exploration. The market for high-quality underwater images is expanding exponentially. Despite this, there are a number of issues including blurriness, dim lighting, poor contrast and color fidelity. Light attenuation, absorption and scattering lower the quality. As a result, it is essential to enhance underwater images, and different image processing techniques are used for enhancement .The deep learning methodology used in this study improves image quality and produce the best outcomes when compared to conventional image enhancing techniques. The architecture used is GAN with the combination of Image processing algorithms as a preprocessing step for implementing deep learning models .The algorithms include Histogram Equalization and Dark Channel Prior. These methods normalizes the contrast of images and removes the hazing or dark parts of the images. The dataset used in this study is EUVP (Paired) which contains about 2186 real-world underwater images. Three parameters, UICM, MSE and PSNR are used to assess quality of enhanced images. The optimum technique for improving the images is determined by comparing the performance of the models after the dataset has been trained through them.