Manuscript received October 8, 2023; revised December 20, 2023; accepted January 2, 2024; published June 20, 2024

Abstract—Protecting maritime borders is crucial to ensuring overall border security. Law enforcement agencies make great use of analyzing images of underwater debris to gather intelligence and detect illicit materials. Underwater image improvement contributes to better data quality and analytical. Nevertheless, underwater image analysis poses greater challenges compared to analyzing images taken above the water, factors like refraction of light and darkness contribute to the degradation of underwater image quality. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed to enhance underwater images, the proposed approach involves splitting underwater colored image to its three basic components, Subsequently, a point spread function is created for each component to describes image blurring factor, The deblurring process is then applied by using wiener filter, the result sharped by sharping filter to clarify edges, contrast linear stretch is performed to improve contrast and visual details. and the resulting image is finally reassembled from the three basic components. The proposed method showed effective results in evaluating the main metrics and gave better results when compared to a number of different methods. These results prove the effectiveness of the proposed method and its ability to practical applications in improving image quality.

Keywords—underwater images, image enhancement, deblurring, point spread function, wiener filter

Cite: Hesham Hashim Mohammed, Shatha A. Baker, and Omar Ibrahim Alsaif, "An Improved Underwater Image Enhancement Approach for Border Security," Journal of Image and Graphics, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 199-204, 2024.

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