Design And Implementation Of A Low-Cost Guided Image Filter For Underwater Image Enhancement

To enhance the visual quality, guided image filter is usually adopted to refine the crude transmission map of underwater images. In this paper, we first develop a simplified guided image filter to reduce the computational complexity of transmission estimation while maintaining good visual quality. Subsequently, a low-cost architecture for the simplified guided image filter is proposed to achieve real-time Full-HD (1920 x 1080) underwater image enhancement. The proposed architecture is synthesized with TSMC 90nm CMOS technology and the result shows that it can operate at 100MHz and support Full-HD image enhancement at a throughput of 30frame/s with 10.5K gate counts and 1.35KB on-chip memory. Compared to previous design, the proposed design uses 11.3% of gate counts and 42.2% of on-chip memory to achieve the same frame rate.