Homomorphic filtering with image fusion for enhancement of details and homogeneous contrast of underwater image

Abstract

The proposed method modified the integration of emphasis homomorphic filtering and image fusion (HFIF) to address these problems. Emphasis homomorphic filtering is equipped with the ability to reduce inhomogeneous illumination in an image by increasing the high frequency image signals and reducing or removing low frequency unwanted illumination. Further, the image is applied with histogram matching to increase the influence of inferior color channel while decreasing the dominant color channel. This will automatically balances the color percentages of the image. The image is further processed through enhanced dual-images fusion to improve the overall image contrast and increases the saturation and brightness of the image. Finally, the input image will go through contrast limited adaptive histogram specification to improve the image contrast locally and reduces the effect of under- and over-enhanced areas. Quantitative and qualitative results prove that the new method has outperformed the other state-of-the-art methods in terms of contrast and image detail. Nevertheless, the aforementioned problems have been significantly reduced. Image color is also highly improved.