Regular inspection of the appearance of underwater structure is an important prerequisite for the smooth operation of a wharf. By the analysis of existing inspection methods，we find that the poor image quality is the main limitation of the application of the visual techniques in the appearance inspection of underwater structure. Combining with the requirement of inspecting underwater structure，we innovatively integrated the artificial multi-underexposure fusion strategy with the color channel compensation method，and verify the visual quality of the underwater image of the image enhancement method by test. The results show that the multi-exposure fusion and color compensation can effectively enhance contrast，recover details，and correct color-cast of the underwater image with high computation efficiency. The image enhancement method can improve the visual quality of underwater images，and help engineers recognize the existing deficiencies of the wharf in time. The number of the matched pairs of SIFT feature points indicates that the proposed algorithm is also beneficial to the subsequent research of automatic deficiency recognition and measurement.