A preliminary study on visibility improvement of turbid underwater images for dismantling of nuclear facilities

•The visibility of blurred underwater images was improved by using an artificial neural network in a turbid underwater cutting environment.•The conditional GAN neural network was adopted to improve the visibility of turbid underwater images.•The neural networks were trained with images with the best visibility and images enhanced with software technology.•Experiments demonstrated that the trained neural network provided significantly improved visibility in turbid images.