Underwater images typically exhibit color distortion and low contrast due to the absorption and scattering of the non-uniform medium during the propagation of light underwater. To address these problems, an effective underwater image restoration method is presented in this paper. Firstly, we adopted an adaptive dark channel prior that can be applied to underwater images with different color tones. Then, the local water light with strong robustness is obtained by utilizing maximum filtering and Gaussian low-pass filtering. Additionally, a linear relationship between blurred and clear images in the dark channel was introduced combining with the attenuation coefficient compensation to estimate the transmission of r, g and b channels. Ultimately, we designed a new adaptive color compensation method by taking into account the attenuation difference of the three color channels. Simulation and experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively improve the clarity and contrast of the image and eliminate color distortion. © 2022 Elsevier GmbH