A Generalized Physical-knowledge-guided Dynamic Model for Underwater Image Enhancement

TL;DR

This paper introduces GUPDM, a generalized underwater image enhancement model that uses physical knowledge and dynamic structures to adaptively improve images affected by water scattering and absorption.

Contribution

It proposes a novel physical-knowledge-guided dynamic model with adaptive modules for diverse underwater scenes, enhancing image quality without needing paired training data.

Findings

Effectively simulates various underwater conditions using physical models.

Adaptive modules improve enhancement across different water types.

Multi-scale feature extraction boosts image detail and contrast.

Abstract

Underwater images often suffer from color distortion and low contrast resulting in various image types, due to the scattering and absorption of light by water. While it is difficult to obtain high-quality paired training samples with a generalized model. To tackle these challenges, we design a Generalized Underwater image enhancement method via a Physical-knowledge-guided Dynamic Model (short for GUPDM), consisting of three parts: Atmosphere-based Dynamic Structure (ADS), Transmission-guided Dynamic Structure (TDS), and Prior-based Multi-scale Structure (PMS). In particular, to cover complex underwater scenes, this study changes the global atmosphere light and the transmission to simulate various underwater image types (e.g., the underwater image color ranging from yellow to blue) through the formation model. We then design ADS and TDS that use dynamic convolutions to adaptively extract prior information from underwater images and generate parameters for PMS. These two modules enable the network to select appropriate parameters for various water types adaptively. Besides, the multi-scale feature extraction module in PMS uses convolution blocks with different kernel sizes and obtains weights for each feature map via channel attention block and fuses them to boost the receptive field of the network. The source code will be available at \href{https://github.com/shiningZZ/GUPDM}{https://github.com/shiningZZ/GUPDM}.