Multilevel weighted enhancement for underwater image dehazing

Attenuation and scattering of light are responsible for haziness in images of underwater scenes. To reduce this effect, we propose an approach for single-image dehazing by multilevel weighted enhancement of the image. The underlying principle is that enhancement at different levels of detail can undo the degradation caused by underwater haze. The depth information is captured implicitly while going through different levels of details due to the depth-variant nature of haze. Hence, we judiciously assign weights to different levels of image details and reveal that their linear combination along with the coarsest information can successfully restore the image. Results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach as compared to state-of-the-art underwater dehazing methods.