Underwater Image Enhancement via Medium Transmission-Guided Multi-Color Space Embedding
Underwater Image Enhancement via Medium Transmission-Guided Multi-Color Space Embedding
Chongyi Li Saeed Anwar, Member, IEEE Junhui Hou, Senior Member, IEEE Runmin Cong, Member, IEEE Chunle Guo Wenqi Ren Member, IEEE

Abstract
Underwater images suffer from color casts and low contrast due to wavelength- and distance-dependent attenuation and scattering. To solve these two degradation issues, we present an underwater image enhancement network via medium transmission-guided multi-color space embedding, called Ucolor. Concretely, we first propose a multi-color space encoder network, which enriches the diversity of feature representations by incorporating the characteristics of different color spaces into a unified structure. Coupled with an attention mechanism, the most discriminative features extracted from multiple color spaces are adaptively integrated and highlighted. Inspired by underwater imaging physical models, we design a medium transmission (indicating the percentage of the scene radiance reaching the camera)-guided decoder network to enhance the response of the network towards quality-degraded regions. As a result, our network can effectively improve the visual quality of underwater images by exploiting multiple color spaces embedding and the advantages of both physical model-based and learning-based methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Ucolor achieves superior performance against state-of-the-art methods in terms of both visual quality and quantitative metrics.
Code Repositories
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Methodology | Metrics |
|---|---|---|
| underwater-image-restoration-on-lsui | Ucolor | PSNR: 22.91 |
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