Color correction of underwater images using automatically extracted sand images

Abstract

Underwater images of coral reefs captured via camera with auto white balance tend to appear greenish or bluish due to the water column effect. We propose a new color correction algorithm that uses the mean color of a sand patch in the scene as a reference color for white balancing. We apply the algorithm to a series of underwater mosaics from video and show that we can batch-run the process by automatically extracting sand patch images from each mosaic. We validate our color correction by measuring the color difference of the actual and corrected color of a giant clam and a sand patch.