Considering the problems of low contrast and color distortion caused by scattering and attenuation of the light in underwater environment, the underwater color image enhancement method was presented, which integrated dark channel prior and the color correction algorithm based on channel histogram quantization. For the underwater color image to be enhanced, underwater optical imaging model was established and the optimized and improved dark channel prior algorithm was used for image deblurring. By analyzing the cumulative histogram of the deblurring image R, G, B three channels, the gray value of each channel was quantified to achieve color correction of the image. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively eliminate the image blur caused by scattering of light, improve the visual quality of the underwater image and restore color balance of the image.