The phenomenon of absorption and scattering exists in underwater propagation of light, which may lead to the color distortion and low contrast of the underwater images.For this reason, an underwater image enhancement algorithm based on dark channel prior and Gamma transform is proposed.First of all, the underwater image transmittance and atmospheric illumination are estimated by dark channel prior in RGB space, and the adaptive compensation parameters are obtained after weighted processing.Then, the image color is corrected.On this basis, the enhanced RGB image is transformed into HSV color space, and adaptive Gamma transform is carried out to the V-channel, thus to improve the contrast of the image.Finally, experiments are carried out on the public underwater image enhancement dataset of RUIE, and comparison is made with the existing enhancement algorithms.The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm significantly improves the visual quality of underwater images and is better than the other algorithms.