Light is attenuated in underwater environments owing to the scattering and absorption effects. Because of the changes in water turbidity and different depths of the fields in underwater photography, the level of fuzziness and color deviation of the images captured underwater is different. Traditional defogging algorithms appear to have limited effectiveness in the case of these images with varying degrees of fuzziness and color deviation. Therefore, the color compensation based on the bright channel and the image fusion method for underwater image enhancement is proposed to resolve this problem. First, in order to obtain a color-compensated version of the original image, the color compensation based on the bright channel is performed on the original image. This color-compensated image is then subjected to adaptive contrast stretching to obtain a clear image with high contrast. Finally, the multiscale fusion strategy is adopted to fuse the color-corrected and contrast-stretched images. Experimental result shows that the proposed algorithm can be employed in a wide range of applications dealing with multiple underwater degraded images. Furthermore, the proposed method can effectively improve underwater image contrast and balance image color without any prior information.