No-reference quality assessment of underwater image enhancement

Yi, Xiao, Jiang, Qiuping and Zhou, Wei 2024. No-reference quality assessment of underwater image enhancement. Displays 81 , 102586. 10.1016/j.displa.2023.102586 Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Due to the attenuation and scattering of light in the water medium, real-world underwater images usually suffer from diverse quality defects, such as color casts, low contrast, and reduced visibility, etc. These quality defects accordingly cause adverse effects on underwater images in practical applications. To tackle the problem, many underwater image enhancement (UIE) techniques have been proposed for improving the quality of raw underwater images, showing heterogeneous performances regarding the enhanced results. Therefore, designing an objective quality metric that can effectively predict the visual quality of enhanced underwater images is desirable. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient yet accurate no-reference quality assessment method to evaluate different UIE results by analyzing the statistics of underwater images. Specifically, we first extract quality-aware features in terms of three key aspects: (1) colorfulness; (2) contrast; (3) visibility. Then, a quality regression model is trained to map the extracted features to subjective scores for enhanced underwater images. Given a testing underwater image, we also first extract its corresponding quality-aware feature vector and feed it into the trained quality regression model for quality prediction. We conduct extensive experiments on two databases to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach. The code is available at https://github.com/yia-yuese/NR-UIQA.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Computer Science & Informatics
Publisher:	Elsevier
ISSN:	0141-9382
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	14 February 2024
Date of Acceptance:	22 November 2023
Last Modified:	21 Feb 2024 06:28
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/164859

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