Abstract: The images taken during seafloor exploration suffer from severe non- uniform illumination, which significantly affect the subsequent applications such as image analysis and panorama stitching. The classical methods of lighting non- uniformity compensation require a certain number of low- texture images to be included in the images taken at different heights, which is difficult to meet in practical applications, so these methods of strong dependence on data have great limitations. In this paper, a general model of illumination compensation for seabed images was theoretically established based on the propagation mechanism of light in water, which could be applied to the illumination compensation of images taken at any height, and the fitting of the model only required a small number of low- texture sub- regions in some images, which greatly reduced the data requirements. Experimental results show that the model- based method can solve the problem of over- reliance on image data in traditional methods, and can effectively solve the problem of uneven illumination of seabed images, which is a practical and feasible illumination compensation method for seabed images.