Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) is essential for mitigating degradations caused by water medium. Although learning-based methods have advanced significantly, most rely on paired datasets with unstable label quality, which bottlenecks model performance. This paper proposes a diffusion-based, in-dataset self-supervised learning strategy designed to exploit the quality distribution of training labels. Specifically, we evaluate label quality via semantic perception embeddings from a pre-trained diffusion model in a training-free manner. These quality scores are subsequently quantized into noise-level indices, guiding a multi-step denoising process for level-wise supervision. This mechanism prevents low-quality labels from degrading the model while maximizing their utility during training. Furthermore, a Fourier-based refinement network is incorporated to explicitly reconstruct high-frequency components. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms SOTA approaches in restoration quality. The code and pre-trained model will be available once accepted in link.
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）
Underwater image enhancement has attracted much attention due to the rise of marine resource development in recent years. Benefit from the powerful representation capabilities of Convolution Neural Networks(CNNs), multiple underwater image enhancement algorithms based on CNNs have been proposed in the last few years. However, almost all of these algorithms employ RGB color space setting, which is insensitive to image properties such as luminance and saturation. To address this problem, we proposed Underwater Image Enhancement Convolution Neural Network using 2 Color Space (UICE^2-Net) that eff…
A Comprehensive Survey on Underwater Image Enhancement Based on Deep Learning
School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Purple Mountain Laboratories（紫金山实验室）；Engineering Research Center of Blockchain Application, Supervision And Management (Southeast University)（区块链应用、监督与管理工程研究中心（东南大学））；State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves, School of Information Science and Engineering, Southeast University（毫米波国家重点实验室，信息科学与工程学院，东南大学）；College of Computing & Data Science at Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算与数据科学学院）
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…
Retinex Meets Language: A Physics-Semantics-Guided Underwater Image Enhancement Network
State Key Laboratory of Physical Oceanography and the Faculty of Information Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China（物理海洋学国家重点实验室和中国海洋大学信息科学与工程学院）；School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen university（中山大学深圳校区计算机科学与技术学院）
A Semi-supervised Physics-Aware Triple-Stream Underwater Image Enhancement Network
State Key Laboratory of Physical Oceanography and the Faculty of Information Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China（物理海洋学国家重点实验室和中国海洋大学信息科学与工程学院）；School of Cyber Science and Technology, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen university（中山大学深圳校区计算机科学与技术学院）；Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Visual Object Detection and Recognition, Harbin Institute of Technology（深圳视觉目标检测与识别重点实验室，哈尔滨工业大学）
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
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 in…
A main challenge faced in the deep learning-based Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) is that the ground truth high-quality image is unavailable. Most of the existing methods first generate approximate reference maps and then train an enhancement network with certainty. This kind of method fails to handle the ambiguity of the reference map. In this paper, we resolve UIE into distribution estimation and consensus process. We present a novel probabilistic network to learn the enhancement distribution of degraded underwater images. Specifically, we combine conditional variational autoencoder with …
VRS-UIE: Value-Driven Reordering Scanning for Underwater Image Enhancement
School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Faculty of Information Technology, Beijing University of Technology（北京工业大学信息技术学院）
IDA-UIE: An Iterative Framework for Deep Network-based Degradation Aware Underwater Image Enhancement
Centre for Intelligent Cyber Physical Systems, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati（印度古瓦哈蒂理工学院智能信息物理系统中心）；Dept. of Electronics and Electrical Engg., Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati（印度古瓦哈蒂理工学院电子与电气工程系）
Underwater Variable Zoom: Depth-Guided Perception Network for Underwater Image Enhancement
School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学计算机科学与技术学院）；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong Technology and Business University（山东工商学院计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Information and Communication Engineering, Dalian Minzu University（大连民族大学信息与通信工程学院）；School of Innovation Experiment, Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学创新实验学院）
Enhancing Underwater Images via Adaptive Semantic-aware Codebook Learning
School of Information Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China（信息科学与工程学院，中国海洋大学）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mississippi State University（电气与计算机工程学院，密苏里州立大学）
Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) technology aims to tackle the challenge of restoring the degraded underwater images due to light absorption and scattering. To address problems, a novel U-Net based Reinforced Swin-Convs Transformer for the Underwater Image Enhancement method (URSCT-UIE) is proposed. Specifically, with the deficiency of U-Net based on pure convolutions, we embedded the Swin Transformer into U-Net for improving the ability to capture the global dependency. Then, given the inadequacy of the Swin Transformer capturing the local attention, the reintroduction of convolutions may c…
Underwater Image Enhancement with Cascaded Contrastive Learning
College of Science and Technology, Ningbo University（宁波大学科学技术学院）；School of Information Science and Engineering, Ningbo University（宁波大学信息科学与工程学院）；Hangzhou DtDream Science and Technology Ltd.（杭州大梦想科技有限公司）；College of Information Science and Technology, Dalian Maritime University（大连海事大学信息科学技术学院）
City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；Tianjin University（天津大学）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）
Underwater image enhancement has been attracting much attention due to its significance in marine engineering and aquatic robotics. Numerous underwater image enhancement algorithms have been proposed in the last few years. However, these algorithms are mainly evaluated using either synthetic datasets or few selected real-world images. It is thus unclear how these algorithms would perform on images acquired in the wild and how we could gauge the progress in the field. To bridge this gap, we present the first comprehensive perceptual study and analysis of underwater image enhancement using large…
Image-Conditional Diffusion Transformer for Underwater Image Enhancement
Ocean College, Jiangsu University of Science and Technology（江苏科技大学海洋学院）；Nanjing Research Institute of Electronic Equipment, China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation（中国航天科工集团有限公司南京电子设备研究所）；Ocean College, Zhejiang University（浙江大学海洋学院）
Real-Time Underwater Image Enhancement via Frequency-Guided Dual-Path Attention
Glasgow College, UESTC, Chengdu, China（格拉斯哥学院，UESTC，成都，中国）；School of Information and Communication Engineering, UESTC, Chengdu, China（信息与通信工程学院，UESTC，成都，中国）；University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK（格拉斯哥大学，格拉斯哥，英国）
Two-Stage Teacher-Student Reliable Prior Learning for Robust Underwater Image Enhancement
College of Future Information Technology, Fudan University（复旦大学未来信息技术学院）；Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom（中国电信人工智能研究院（TeleAI））；Faculty of Robot Science and Engineering, Northeastern University（东北大学机器人科学与工程学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics and Electronics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学人工智能与光学电子学院（iOPEN））
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）
PUGAN: Physical Model-Guided Underwater Image Enhancement Using GAN with Dual-Discriminators
Institute of Information Science, Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学信息科学研究所）；School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University（山东大学控制科学与工程学院）；College of Computer Science, Nankai University（南开大学计算机学院）；School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
A Physical Model-Guided Framework for Underwater Image Enhancement and Depth Estimation
Hangzhou Innovation Institute, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学杭州创新研究院）；Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）；Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University（清华大学计算机科学与技术系）
Style-Decoupled Adaptive Routing Network for Underwater Image Enhancement
State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University（测绘遥感信息工程国家重点实验室，武汉大学）；Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（航空工程系，香港理工大学）
FDCE-Net: Underwater Image Enhancement with Embedding Frequency and Dual Color Encoder
College of Computer Science & Technology, Qingdao University（青岛大学计算机科学与技术学院）；College of Information Science and Technology, Dalian Maritime University（大连海事大学信息科学技术学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology（华南理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Learning A Physical-aware Diffusion Model Based on Transformer for Underwater Image Enhancement
School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University（智能科学与技术学院，南京大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing Normal University（人工智能学院，南京师范大学）
Downstream Task Inspired Underwater Image Enhancement: A Perception-Aware Study from Dataset Construction to Network Design
State Key Laboratory of Physical Oceanography, Ocean University of China（中国海洋大学物理海洋国家重点实验室）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mississippi State University（密苏里州立大学电子与计算机工程系）
