Abstract
Exploring and monitoring underwater environments pose unique challenges due to water’s complex optical properties, which significantly impact image quality. Challenges like light absorption and scattering result in color distortion and decreased visibility. Traditional underwater image acquisition methods face these obstacles, highlighting the need for advanced techniques to solve the image color shift and image detail loss caused by the underwater environment in the image enhancement process. This study proposes a salient region-guided underwater image enhancement fusion method to alleviate these problems. First, this study proposes an advanced dark channel prior method to reduce haze effects in underwater images, significantly improving visibility and detail. Subsequently, a comprehensive RGB color correction restores the underwater scene’s natural appearance. The innovation of our method is that it fuses through a combination of Laplacian and Gaussian pyramids, guided by salient region coefficients, thus preserving and accentuating the visually significant elements of the underwater environment. Comprehensive subjective and objective evaluations demonstrate our method’s superior performance in enhancing contrast, color depth, and overall visual quality compared to existing methods.