CSUID – Comprehensive synthetic underwater image dataset

The underwater environment is characterized by complex light traversal, encompassing effects such as color loss, contrast loss, water distortion, backscatter, light attenuation, and color cast, which vary depending on water purity, depth, and other factors. The dataset presented in this paper is prepared with 100 ground-truth images and 1,50,000 synthetic underwater images. This dataset approximates the effects of underwater environment with implementable combinations of color cast, blurring, low-light, and contrast reduction. These effects and their combinations, with different severity levels are applied to each ground-truth image to generate as many as 150 synthetic underwater images. In addition to the dataset of 1,50,100 images, a comprehensive set of 21 focus metrics, including the average contrast measure operator, Brenner's gradient-based metric, and many others, are calculated for each image.