Enhancement-Registration-Homogenization (ERH): A Comprehensive Underwater Visual Reconstruction Paradigm

This paper presents a comprehensive underwater visual reconstruction paradigm that comprises three procedures, i.e., the E-procedure, the R-procedure, and the H-procedure. The E-procedure enhances original underwater images based on color compensation balance and weighted image fusion, yielding restored color, sharpened edges, and global contrast. The R-procedure registers multiple enhanced underwater images by exploiting global similarity and local deformation. The H-procedure homogenizes the registered underwater images by multi-scale composition strategy, which eliminates the inhomogeneous transition and brightness difference across overlapping regions, resulting in a reconstructed wide-field underwater image with comfortable and natural visibility. The three procedures operate in a cascade where the former procedure processes underwater images in a way that facilitates the latter one. We refer to the overall three procedures as the Enhancement-Registration-Homogenization (ERH) paradigm. Comprehensive qualitative and quantitative empirical evaluations reveal that our ERH paradigm outperforms state-of-the-art visual reconstruction methods, including the AutoStitch, APAP, SPHP, APNAP, and REW.