Underwater images typically suffer from color deviations and low visibility due to the wavelength-dependent light absorption and scattering. To deal with these degradation issues, we propose an efficient and robust underwater image enhancement method, called MLLE. Specifically, we first locally adjust the color and details of an input image according to a minimum color loss principle and a maximum attenuation map-guided fusion strategy. Afterward, we employ the integral and squared integral maps to compute the mean and variance of local image blocks, which are used to adaptively adjust the contrast of the input image. Meanwhile, a color balance strategy is introduced to balance the color differences between channel a and channel b in the CIELAB color space. Our enhanced results are characterized by vivid color, improved contrast, and enhanced details. Extensive experiments on three underwater image enhancement datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Our method is also appealing in its fast processing speed within 1s for processing an image of size $1024\times 1024 \times 3$ on a single CPU. Experiments further suggest that our method can effectively improve the performance of underwater image segmentation, keypoint detection, and saliency detection. The project page is available at https://li-chongyi.github.io/proj

Underwater images typically suffer from various quality degradation issues due to the scattering and absorption of light, but these degraded-quality underwater images are unbeneficial for analysis and applications. To effectively solve these quality degradation issues, an underwater image enhancement method via weighted wavelet visual perception fusion is introduced, called WWPF. Concretely, we first present an attenuation-map-guided color correction strategy to correct the color distortion of an underwater image. Subsequently, we employ the maximum information entropy optimized global contrast strategy to the color-corrected image to obtain a global contrast-enhanced image. Meanwhile, we apply a fast integration optimized local contrast strategy to the color-corrected image to get a local contrast-enhanced image. To exploit the complementary of the global contrast-enhanced image and the local contrast-enhanced image, we introduce a weighted wavelet visual perception fusion strategy to obtain a high-quality underwater image by fusing the high-frequency and low-frequency components of images at different scales. Our extensive experiments on three benchmarks validate that our WWPF outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in qualitative and quantitative. Besides, the underwater images processed by our WWPF also benefit practical underwater applications. The code is available https://github.com/Li-Chongyi/WWPF_code.

An underwater image often suffers from quality degradation issues, such as color deviations, low contrast, and blurred details, due to the absorption and scattering of light. In this article, we propose to address the aforementioned degradation issues via attenuated color channel correction and detail preserved contrast enhancement. Concretely, we first propose an underwater image color correction method. Considering the differences between superior and inferior color channels of an underwater image, the inferior color channels are compensated via especially designed attenuation matrices. We then employ a dual-histogram-based iterative threshold method and a limited histogram method with Rayleigh distribution to improve the global and local contrast of the color-corrected image, thus achieving a global contrast-enhanced version and a local contrast-enhanced version, respectively. To integrate the complementary merits between the global contrast-enhanced version and the local contrast-enhanced version, we adopt a multiscale fusion strategy to fuse them. Finally, we propose a multiscale unsharp masking strategy to further sharpen the fused image for better visual quality. Extensive experiments on four underwater image enhancement benchmark data sets demonstrate that our method effectively enhances underwater images qualitatively and quantitatively. Besides, our method also generalizes well to the enhancement of low-light images and hazy images.

This paper focuses on the trajectory tracking control of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) in the presence of dynamic uncertainties and time-varying external disturbances. Two adaptive integral terminal sliding mode control schemes, namely, adaptive integral terminal sliding mode control (AITSMC) scheme and adaptive fast integral terminal sliding mode control (AFITSMC) scheme are proposed for UUVs based on integral terminal sliding mode (ITSM) and fast ITSM (FITSM), respectively. Each control scheme is double-looped: composed of a kinematic controller and a dynamic controller. First, a kinematic controller is designed for each of the two control schemes. The two kinematic controllers are based on ITSM and FITSM, respectively. These kinematic controllers yield local finite-time convergence of the position tracking errors to zero meanwhile avoid the singularity problem in the conventional terminal sliding mode control (TSMC). Then, using the output of the kinematic controller as a reference velocity command, a dynamic controller is developed for each of the two control schemes. The two dynamic controllers are also based on ITSM and FITSM, respectively. An adaptive mechanism is introduced to estimate the unknown parameters of the upper bound of the lumped system uncertainty which consists of dynamic uncertainties and time-varying external disturbances so that the prior knowledge of the upper bound of the lumped system uncertainty is not required. The estimated parameters are then used as controller parameters to eliminate the effects of the lumped system uncertainty. The convergence rate of the integral terminal sliding variable vector is investigated and the local finite-time convergence of the velocity tracking errors to zero in the ITSM or FITSM is obtained. At last, based on the designed kinematic and dynamic controllers, the finite-time stability of the full closed-loop cascaded system is shown. The two proposed control schemes improve the tracking accuracy over the existing globally finite-time stable tracking control (GFTSTC) and adaptive nonsingular TSMC schemes, and enhance the robustness against parameter uncertainties and external disturbances over the GFTSTC scheme. Compared with the conventional adaptive integral sliding mode control (AISMC) scheme, the two proposed control schemes offer faster convergence rate and stronger robustness against dynamic uncertainties and time-varying external disturbances for the trajectory tracking control of UUVs due to involving the fractional integrator. Comparative numerical simulations are performed on the dynamic model of the Omni Directional Intelligent Navigator UUV for two trajectory tracking cases. The convergence rate and robustness to uncertainties and disturbances are quantified as the convergent time and bounds of the steady-state position and velocity tracking errors, respectively. The results show that the two proposed control schemes improve at least 20s in convergence rate and enhance about 2% robustness in position tracking and 20% robustness in velocity tracking over the AISMC scheme.

This study proposes an adaptive non‐singular integral terminal sliding mode control (ANITSMC) scheme for trajectory tracking of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) with dynamic uncertainties and time‐varying external disturbances. The ANITSMC is first proposed for a first‐order uncertain non‐linear dynamic system to eliminate the singularity problem in conventional terminal sliding mode control (TSMC) and avoid the requirement of the bound information of the lumped system uncertainty. The time taken to reach the equilibrium point from any initial error is guaranteed to be finite. The proposed ANITSMC is then applied to trajectory tracking control of AUVs. It guarantees that the velocity tracking errors locally converge to zero in finite time and after that the position tracking errors locally converge to zero exponentially. The designed ANITSMC of AUVs avoids the requirement of the prior knowledge of the lumped system uncertainty bounds as opposite to the existing globally finite‐time stable tracking control (GFTSTC), provides higher tracking accuracy than the existing GFTSTC and adaptive non‐singular TSMC (ANTSMC) and offers faster convergence rate and better robustness against dynamic uncertainties and time‐varying external disturbances than the adaptive proportional‐integral sliding mode control (APISMC). Comparative simulation results are presented to validate the superiority of the ANITSMC over the APISMC.