Underwater light absorption and scattering lead to color deviation, low brightness, fuzzy details and low contrast of underwater images. In this contribution, an underwater image enhancement algorithm based on color balance and multi-scale fusion is proposed. Firstly, a color balance method is used to correct the image color. Then, based on an improved dark channel prior algorithm, the local contrast information of the color balanced image is used to derive two atmospheric lights and transmission maps, which are transformed into the images with enhanced contrast and brightness, respectively. Finally, the multi-scale fusion method is adopted to fuse the contrast enhanced image and the brightness improved image according to the weights. The proposed algorithm is compared with other underwater image enhancement algorithms in qualitative and quantitative evaluation. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively eliminate color deviation, remove dark areas, and improve brightness and contrast of underwater images. The enhanced images generated by the proposed algorithm are superior to those generated by other algorithms in indicators of PSNR, SSIM, UIQM and UCIQE. Thus, the proposed algorithm is suitable for underwater image enhancement.

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