The imaging process of the underwater image is similar to that of the haze image. However, the traditional dehazing methods used to underwater image processing can not obtain fruitful results. Aimed at problems of serious color attenuation and blue (green) tone during capturing underwater images, we propose an underwater image enhancement method based on improved dark channel prior and color correction. By considering the propagation characteristics of light in water, we improve the dark channel prior dehazing algorithm for underwater image, and by considering the inverse channel of red channel, we obtain the underwater dark channel and image background light. It is proposed to use the improved underwater dark channel prior to remove the backward scattered light firstly, and then use the white balance algorithm to correct color. The experimental results reveal that the method proposed in this paper, compared with traditional methods, can acquire images with higher resolution and higher contrast during processing serious backscatter of underwater images.