Underwater image enhancement using colour balancing and morphological residual processing through gamma correction

Abstract Underwater images typically suffer from poor visibility, low contrast, and severe color distortion caused by wavelength-dependent absorption and scattering of light. These degradations not only reduce visual quality but also affect subsequent analysis and interpretation in marine and robotic imaging applications. To address these challenges, this study presents an efficient underwater image enhancement (UIE) framework that integrates color balancing, morphological residual processing, and gamma correction to achieve natural color restoration and structural enhancement. Initially, an adaptive color compensation strategy corrects the imbalance in red and blue channels, followed by morphological residual processing that refines fine textures while suppressing unwanted noise. The enhanced outputs are then fused through an adaptive multiscale fusion process guided by optimized weight maps to preserve both global illumination and local detail. A final gamma correction step ensures perceptually balanced contrast and brightness. The proposed method requires no training data or prior depth estimation making it computationally efficient and robust for real-time applications. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple benchmark underwater datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently outperforms 22 state-of-the-art UIE techniques in both qualitative and quantitative assessments. The method achieves superior results in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index measure (SSIM), underwater image quality measure (UIQM), and underwater color image quality evaluation (UCIQE) metrics, confirming its capability to restore realistic colors, enhance visibility, and preserve fine details. The proposed framework provides an effective and lightweight solution for practical underwater imaging enhancement. This work supports SDG 14 (Life Below Water) by enhancing underwater imagery for marine monitoring, SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure) through an efficient real-time imaging framework, and SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) by enabling accurate underwater inspection that promotes sustainable resource use.