To improve the quality of underwater images, various kinds of underwater image enhancement (UIE) operators have been proposed during the past few years. However, the lack of effective objective evaluation methods limits the further development of UIE techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel rank learning guided no-reference quality assessment method for UIE. Our approach, termed Twice Mixing, is motivated by the observation that a mid-quality image can be generated by mixing a high-quality image with its low-quality version. Typical mixup algorithms linearly interpolate a given pair of input data. However, the human visual system is non-uniformity and non-linear in processing images. Therefore, instead of directly training a deep neural network based on the mixed images and their absolute scores calculated by linear combinations, we propose to train a Siamese Network to learn their quality rankings. Twice Mixing is trained based on an elaborately formulated self-supervision mechanism. Specifically, before each iteration, we randomly generate two mixing ratios which will be employed for both generating virtual images and guiding the network training. In the test phase, a single branch of the network is extracted to predict the quality rankings of different UIE outputs. We conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the previous methods significantly.
Qingdao University（青岛大学）；Ocean University of China（中国海洋大学）
Achieving subjective and objective quality assessment of underwater images is of high significance in underwater visual perception and image/video processing. However, the development of underwater image quality assessment (UIQA) is limited for the lack of comprehensive human subjective user study with publicly available dataset and reliable objective UIQA metric. To address this issue, we establish a large-scale underwater image dataset, dubbed UID2021, for evaluating no-reference UIQA metrics. The constructed dataset contains 60 multiply degraded underwater images collected from various sour…
Fuzhou University（福州大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Beijing University of Technology（北京工业大学）；Beijing Artificial Intelligence Institute（北京人工智能研究院）；Université de Nantes（南特大学）；Laboratoire des Sciences du Numérique de Nantes（南特数字科学实验室）
The widespread image applications have greatly promoted the vision-based tasks, in which the Image Quality Assessment (IQA) technique has become an increasingly significant issue. For user enjoyment in multimedia systems, the IQA exploits image fidelity and aesthetics to characterize user experience; while for other tasks such as popular object recognition, there exists a low correlation between utilities and perceptions. In such cases, the fidelity-based and aesthetics-based IQA methods cannot be directly applied. To address this issue, this paper proposes a utility-oriented IQA in object rec…
Underwater image enhancement is such an important vision task due to its significance in marine engineering and aquatic robot. It is usually work as a pre-processing step to improve the performance of high level vision tasks such as underwater object detection. Even though many previous works show the underwater image enhancement algorithms can boost the detection accuracy of the detectors, no work specially focus on investigating the relationship between these two tasks. This is mainly because existing underwater datasets lack either bounding box annotations or high quality reference images, …
PIGUIQA: A Physical Imaging Guided Perceptual Framework for Underwater Image Quality Assessment
Chongqing Research Institute of Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学重庆研究所）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Faculty of Computing（计算机学院）；School of Computer Science（计算机科学学院）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research（信息与通信研究所以）
Underwater Optical Image Processing: A Comprehensive Review
Kyushu Institute of Technology（九州工业大学）；Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院）；Yangzhou University（扬州大学）；Nanjing Normal University（南京师范大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
Centre for Intelligent Sensing, Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学智能感知中心）
Underwater images are degraded by the selective attenuation of light that distorts colours and reduces contrast. The degradation extent depends on the water type, the distance between an object and the camera, and the depth under the water surface the object is at. Underwater image filtering aims to restore or to enhance the appearance of objects captured in an underwater image. Restoration methods compensate for the actual degradation, whereas enhancement methods improve either the perceived image quality or the performance of computer vision algorithms. The growing interest in underwater ima…
UIEDP:Underwater Image Enhancement with Diffusion Prior
Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Hangzhou Innovation Institute, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学杭州创新研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Nankai University（南开大学）；Hisilicon Technologies Co. Ltd.（海思技术有限公司）；Henan Institute of Science and Technology（河南科技学院）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）
In this paper, we present a ranking-based underwater image quality assessment (UIQA) method, abbreviated as URanker. The URanker is built on the efficient conv-attentional image Transformer. In terms of underwater images, we specially devise (1) the histogram prior that embeds the color distribution of an underwater image as histogram token to attend global degradation and (2) the dynamic cross-scale correspondence to model local degradation. The final prediction depends on the class tokens from different scales, which comprehensively considers multi-scale dependencies. With the margin ranking…
Recently, learning-based algorithms have shown impressive performance in underwater image enhancement. Most of them resort to training on synthetic data and achieve outstanding performance. However, these methods ignore the significant domain gap between the synthetic and real data (i.e., interdomain gap), and thus the models trained on synthetic data often fail to generalize well to real underwater scenarios. Furthermore, the complex and changeable underwater environment also causes a great distribution gap among the real data itself (i.e., intra-domain gap). However, almost no research focus…
PHISWID: Physics-Inspired Underwater Image Dataset Synthesized from RGB-D Images
Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Osaka（大阪大学工学研究科）；Graduate School of BASE, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology（东京大学农业技术大学院大学）
Dual High-Order Total Variation Model for Underwater Image Restoration
College of Computer Science and Technology, Qingdao University（青岛大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Key Laboratory of Knowledge Automation for Industrial Processes, Ministry of Education, the School of Automation and Electrical Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing（北京科技大学自动化与电气工程学院 工业过程知识自动化教育部重点实验室）
DACA-Net: A Degradation-Aware Conditional Diffusion Network for Underwater Image Enhancement
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Guangzhou)（香港科学与技术大学（广州）、广东海洋工程科学实验室（广州））；The Hong Kong University of Science（香港科学与技术大学）；Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Guangzhou)（广东工程实验室（广州））
Underwater Vehicles have become more sophisticated, driven by the off-shore sector and the scientific community's rapid advancements in underwater operations. Notably, many underwater tasks, including the assessment of subsea infrastructure, are performed with the assistance of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). There have been recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and, notably, Deep Learning (DL) models and applications, which have widespread usage in a variety of fields, including aerial unmanned vehicles, autonomous car navigation, and other applications. However, they ar…
Causal Disentanglement-Inspired Degradation Representation Learning for Full-Reference Image Quality Assessment
School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwest Jiaotong University（计算机与人工智能学院，西南交通大学）；School of Transportation and Logistics, Southwest Jiaotong University（交通运输与物流学院，西南交通大学）；School of Physics, Northeast Normal University（物理学院，东北师范大学）；School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics（计算机与人工智能学院，江西财经大学）；School of Information Management, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics（信息管理学院，江西财经大学）
An interpretable approach to automating the assessment of biofouling in video footage
Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis, The University of Melbourne（生物安全风险分析卓越中心，墨尔本大学）；Melbourne Centre for Data Science, The University of Melbourne（墨尔本数据科学中心，墨尔本大学）；Biosecurity Animal Division, Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry（农业、渔业和林业部生物安全动物司）
Severe color casts, low contrast and blurriness of underwater images caused by light absorption and scattering result in a difficult task for exploring underwater environments. Different from most of previous underwater image enhancement methods that compute light attenuation along object-camera path through hazy image formation model, we propose a novel jointly wavelength compensation and dehazing network (JWCDN) that takes into account the wavelength attenuation along surface-object path and the scattering along object-camera path simultaneously. By embedding a simplified underwater formatio…
Griffith University（格里菲斯大学）；Australian Rivers Institute（澳大利亚河流研究所）；University of the Sunshine Coast（阳光海岸大学）
Uses of underwater videos to assess diversity and abundance of fish are being rapidly adopted by marine biologists. Manual processing of videos for quantification by human analysts is time and labour intensive. Automatic processing of videos can be employed to achieve the objectives in a cost and time-efficient way. The aim is to build an accurate and reliable fish detection and recognition system, which is important for an autonomous robotic platform. However, there are many challenges involved in this task (e.g. complex background, deformation, low resolution and light propagation). Recent a…
Edith Cowan University（埃迪斯科文大学）；The University of Western Australia（西澳大学）
Monitoring underwater habitats is a vital part of observing the condition of the environment. The detection and mapping of underwater vegetation, especially seagrass has drawn the attention of the research community as early as the nineteen eighties. Initially, this monitoring relied on in situ observation by experts. Later, advances in remote-sensing technology, satellite-monitoring techniques and, digital photo- and video-based techniques opened a window to quicker, cheaper, and, potentially, more accurate seagrass-monitoring methods. So far, for seagrass detection and mapping, digital image…
American University of Beirut（贝鲁特美国大学）；Reinstein Vision；London Vision Clinic（伦敦视力诊所）；Columbia University Medical Center（哥伦比亚大学医学中心）；Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；Biomedical Science Research Institute, Ulster University（阿尔斯特大学生物医学科学研究所）；Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine（迈阿密大学米勒医学院巴斯康帕尔默眼科研究所）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Saint Joseph University（圣约瑟夫大学）；American University of Beirut Medical Center（贝鲁特美国大学医学中心）
