ENHANCING THE UNDERWATER IMAGE USING STATIONARY WAVELET TRANSFORM

Abstract

Image enhancement is one of the major issues in the area of image processing. Dredging the ocean’s surface for identifying the living and non-living things is a complicated task in the present era. Identifying the objects in the underwater is done with the help of images. Generally, these images are low contrast gray scale images where the objects cannot be viewed clearly because of the poor quality. As depth of the water increases, the problem of identifying the objects becomes much more complex. The problems vary according to the type of water, depth, distance between the camera and object. This paper deals with enhancing the underwater image using stationary wavelet transform by working on the color correction and white balance. This enhancement process involves few steps. In the first step, histogram equalization is performed on the degraded image for adjusting the contrast of an image. In the second step, white balancing algorithm is performed in order to enhance the dark regions. In the next step, the outputs from step1 and step2 are fused using stationary wavelet transform.