<p>The phenomenon of attenuation and scattering of light propagating in water leads to such problems as color deviation and blur in underwater imaging. These problems bring great challenges to the subsequent feature matching, target recognition and other tasks. Therefore, this paper proposes an underwater image enhancement method by double compensation with comparative adjustment or edge reinforcement. The experiments have found that the proposed method has good underwater color image quality evaluation (<i>UCIQE</i>) value, underwater image quality measures (<i>UIQM</i>) value, and the number of feature matching points. This demonstrates that the proposed method has good color correction ability for underwater images with different attenuation levels, where the processed images have more details suitable for feature matching.</p>