Semantic-aware Texture-Structure Feature Collaboration for Underwater Image Enhancement

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel underwater image enhancement method that leverages semantic-aware features and multi-scale refinement to improve visual quality and high-level vision task performance.

Contribution

It proposes a collaborative framework combining semantic-aware pretrained models with a multi-path refinement module for robust underwater image enhancement.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets.

Enhances high-level vision tasks like underwater salient object detection.

Demonstrates robustness in unseen underwater scenarios.

Abstract

Underwater image enhancement has become an attractive topic as a significant technology in marine engineering and aquatic robotics. However, the limited number of datasets and imperfect hand-crafted ground truth weaken its robustness to unseen scenarios, and hamper the application to high-level vision tasks. To address the above limitations, we develop an efficient and compact enhancement network in collaboration with a high-level semantic-aware pretrained model, aiming to exploit its hierarchical feature representation as an auxiliary for the low-level underwater image enhancement. Specifically, we tend to characterize the shallow layer features as textures while the deep layer features as structures in the semantic-aware model, and propose a multi-path Contextual Feature Refinement Module (CFRM) to refine features in multiple scales and model the correlation between different features. In addition, a feature dominative network is devised to perform channel-wise modulation on the aggregated texture and structure features for the adaptation to different feature patterns of the enhancement network. Extensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves more appealing results and outperforms state-of-the-art methods by large margins. We also apply the proposed algorithm to the underwater salient object detection task to reveal the favorable semantic-aware ability for high-level vision tasks. The code is available at STSC.