Images that are taken underwater mostly present color shift with hazy effects due to the special property of water. Underwater image enhancement methods are proposed to handle this issue. However, their enhancement results are only evaluated on a small number of underwater images. The lack of a sufficiently large and diverse dataset for efficient evaluation of underwater image enhancement methods provokes the present paper. The present paper proposes an organized method to synthesize diverse underwater images, which can function as a benchmark dataset. The present synthesis is based on the underwater image formation model, which describes the physical degradation process. The indoor RGB-D image dataset is used as the seed for underwater style image generation. The ambient light is simulated based on the statistical mean value of real-world underwater images. Attenuation coefficients for diverse water types are carefully selected. Finally, in total 14490 underwater images of 10 water types are synthesized. Based on the synthesized database, state-of-the-art image enhancement methods are appropriately evaluated. Besides, the large diverse underwater image database is beneficial in the development of learning-based methods.
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