• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.34 no.6
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• pp.442-453
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• 2020

Underwater color images suffer from low visibility and color cast effects caused by light attenuation by water and floating particles. This study applied single image enhancement techniques to enhance the quality of underwater images and compared their performance with real underwater images taken in Korean waters. Dark channel prior (DCP), gradient transform, image fusion, and generative adversarial networks (GAN), such as cycleGAN and underwater GAN (UGAN), were considered for single image enhancement. Their performance was evaluated in terms of underwater image quality measure, underwater color image quality evaluation, gray-world assumption, and blur metric. The DCP saturated the underwater images to a specific greenish or bluish color tone and reduced the brightness of the background signal. The gradient transform method with two transmission maps were sensitive to the light source and highlighted the region exposed to light. Although image fusion enabled reasonable color correction, the object details were lost due to the last fusion step. CycleGAN corrected overall color tone relatively well but generated artifacts in the background. UGAN showed good visual quality and obtained the highest scores against all figures of merit (FOMs) by compensating for the colors and visibility compared to the other single enhancement methods.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2002.07a
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• pp.180-183
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• 2002

In this paper, we propose new unsharp masking technique based on the multiscale gradient planes. The unsharp masking technique is implemented as a high-pass filter and improves the sharpness of degraded images. However, the conventional unsharp masking enhances the noise component simultaneously. To reduce the noise influence, we introduce the edge information from the difference of the gradient values between two consecutive scales of the multiscale gradient. The multiscale gradient indicates the presence of image edges as the ratio between the gradients between two different scales by its multiscale nature. The noise reduction of the proposed method does not depend on the variance of images and noises. In experiment, we demonstrate enhancement results for blurred noisy images and compare with the conventional cubic unsharp masking technique.