To solve the problem of color distortion,such as low contrast and color imbalance in photos and videos taken in an underwater setting,a method of underwater image enhancement is proposed,which combines adaptive color equalization with depth measurement in the underwater scene.The method is composed of the following three steps.Firstly,regarding the issue of severe visual color bias,the preprocessing of adaptive color equalization is conducted on the channels with severe color bias to highlight the texture features.Secondly,according to the images'general texture distribution characteristics,feature extraction is conducted,and background light estimation,scene depth estimation and transmission coefficient mapping estimation are conducted on the images'channels.Finally,the scene brightness recovery model is used for feature fusion,and the histogram equalization algorithm is used to obtain the enhanced underwater images.In order to prove the effectiveness and advancement of the method,real underwater degraded images are selected as the processing object,and the enhanced images are compared in general by using the quality evaluation index of UIQM.The results show that the algorithm effectively enhances the sharpness and chromaticity of the underwater degraded images,and clearly restores the image details.