Unsupervised Multi-Expert Learning Model for Underwater Image Enhancement

Underwater image enhancement aims to restore a clean appearance and thus improves the quality of underwater degraded images.Current methods feed the whole image directly into the model for enhancement.However,they ignored that the R,G and B channels of underwater degraded images present varied degrees of degradation,due to the selective absorption for the light.To address this issue,we propose an unsupervised multi-expert learning model by considering the enhancement of each color channel.Specifically,an unsupervised architecture based on generative adversarial network is employed to alleviate the need for paired underwater images.Based on this,we design a generator,including a multi-expert encoder,a feature fusion module and a feature fusion-guided decoder,to generate the clear underwater image.Accordingly,a multi-expert discriminator is proposed to verify the authenticity of the R,G and B channels,respectively.In addition,content perceptual loss and edge loss are introduced into the loss function to further improve the content and details of the enhanced images.Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves more pleasing results in vision quality.Various metrics(PSNR,SSIM,UIQM and UCIQE) evaluated on our enhanced images have been improved obviously.

Underwater Image Enhancement Based on IMSRCR and CLAHE-WGIF

Aiming at the scattering and absorption of light in the water body,which causes the problems of color shift,uneven brightness,poor sharpness and missing details in the acquired underwater images,an underwater image enhancement algorithm based on IMSRCR and CLAHE-WGIF is proposed.Firstly,the IMSRCR algorithm proposed in this paper is used to process the original underwater image with adaptive color shift correction;secondly,the image is converted to HSV color space,and the segmentation exponential algorithm is used to process the S component to enhance the image saturation;finally,multi-scale Retinex is used to decompose the V component image into detail layer and base layer,and adaptive two-dimensional gamma correction is made to the base layer to adjust the brightness unevenness,while the detail layer is processed by CLAHE-WGIF algorithm to enhance the image contrast and detail information.The experimental results show that our algorithm has some advantages over existing algorithms in both subjective and objective evaluations,and the information entropy of the image is improved by 6.3%on average,and the UIQM and UCIQE indexes are improved by 12.9%and 20.3%on average.

Underwater image enhancement by maximum-likelihood based adaptive color correction and robust scattering removal

Underwater images often exhibit severe color deviations and degraded visibility,which limits many practical applications in ocean engineering.Although extensive research has been conducted into underwater image enhancement,little of which demonstrates the significant robustness and generalization for diverse real-world underwater scenes.In this paper,we propose an adaptive color correction algorithm based on the maximum likelihood estimation of Gaussian parameters,which effectively removes color casts of a variety of underwater images.A novel algorithm using weighted combination of gradient maps in HSV color space and absolute difference of intensity for accurate background light estimation is proposed,which circumvents the influence of white or bright regions that challenges existing physical model-based methods.To enhance contrast of resultant images,a piece-wise affine transform is applied to the transmission map estimated via background light differential.Finally,with the estimated background light and transmission map,the scene radiance is recovered by addressing an inverse problem of image formation model.Extensive experiments reveal that our results are characterized by natural appearance and genuine color,and our method achieves competitive performance with the state-of-the-art methods in terms of objective evaluation metrics,which further validates the better robustness and higher generalization ability of our enhancement model.

Turbidity-adaptive underwater image enhancement method using image fusion

Clear,correct imaging is a prerequisite for underwater operations.In real freshwater environment including rivers and lakes,the water bodies are usually turbid and dynamic,which brings extra troubles to quality of imaging due to color deviation and suspended particulate.Most of the existing underwater imaging methods focus on relatively clear underwater environment,it is uncertain that if those methods can work well in turbid and dynamic underwater environments.In this paper,we propose a turbidity-adaptive underwater image enhancement method.To deal with attenuation and scattering of varying degree,the turbidity is detected by the histogram of images.Based on the detection result,different image enhancement strategies are designed to deal with the problem of color deviation and blurring.The proposed method is verified by an underwater image dataset captured in real underwater environment.The result is evaluated by image metrics including structure similarity index measure,underwater color image quality evaluation metric,and speeded-up robust features.Test results exhibit that the method can correct the color deviation and improve the quality of underwater images.

An Approach to Synthesize Diverse Underwater Image Dataset

Images that are taken underwater mostly present color shift with hazy effects due to the special property of water.Underwater image enhancement methods are proposed to handle this issue.However,their enhancement results are only evaluated on a small number of underwater images.The lack of a sufficiently large and diverse dataset for efficient evaluation of underwater image enhancement methods provokes the present paper.The present paper proposes an organized method to synthesize diverse underwater images,which can function as a benchmark dataset.The present synthesis is based on the underwater image formation model,which describes the physical degradation process.The indoor RGB-D image dataset is used as the seed for underwater style image generation.The ambient light is simulated based on the statistical mean value of real-world underwater images.Attenuation coefficients for diverse water types are carefully selected.Finally,in total 14490 underwater images of 10 water types are synthesized.Based on the synthesized database,state-of-the-art image enhancement methods are appropriately evaluated.Besides,the large diverse underwater image database is beneficial in the development of learning-based methods.

UnderwaterWaste Recognition and Localization Based on Improved YOLOv5

With the continuous development of the economy and society,plastic pollution in rivers,lakes,oceans,and other bodies of water is increasingly severe,posing a serious challenge to underwater ecosystems.Effective cleaning up of underwater litter by robots relies on accurately identifying and locating the plastic waste.However,it often causes significant challenges such as noise interference,low contrast,and blurred textures in underwater optical images.A weighted fusion-based algorithm for enhancing the quality of underwater images is proposed,which combines weighted logarithmic transformations,adaptive gamma correction,improved multi-scale Retinex(MSR)algorithm,and the contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization(CLAHE)algorithm.The proposed algorithm improves brightness,contrast,and color recovery and enhances detail features resulting in better overall image quality.A network framework is proposed in this article based on the YOLOv5 model.MobileViT is used as the backbone of the network framework,detection layer is added to improve the detection capability for small targets,self-attention and mixed-attention modules are introduced to enhance the recognition capability of important features.The cross stage partial(CSP)structure is employed in the spatial pyramid pooling(SPP)section to enrich feature information,and the complete intersection over union(CIOU)loss is replaced with the focal efficient intersection over union(EIOU)loss to accelerate convergence while improving regression accuracy.Experimental results proved that the target recognition algorithm achieved a recognition accuracy of 0.913 and ensured a recognition speed of 45.56 fps/s.Subsequently,Using red,green,blue and depth(RGB-D)camera to construct a system for identifying and locating underwater plastic waste.Experiments were conducted underwater for recognition,localization,and error analysis.The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for identifying and locating underwater plastic waste,and it has good localization accuracy.

Underwater image quality enhancement of sea cucumbers based on improved histogram equalization and wavelet transform

Sea cucumbers usually live in an environment where lighting and visibility are generally not controllable,which cause the underwater image of sea cucumbers to be distorted,blurred,and severely attenuated.Therefore,the valuable information from such an image cannot be fully extracted for further processing.To solve the problems mentioned above and improve the quality of the underwater images of sea cucumbers,pre-processing of a sea cucumber image is attracting increasing interest.This paper presents a newmethod based on contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization and wavelet transform(CLAHE-WT)to enhance the sea cucumber image quality.CLAHE was used to process the underwater image for increasing contrast based on the Rayleigh distribution,and WTwas used for de-noising based on a soft threshold.Qualitative analysis indicated that the proposed method exhibited better performance in enhancing the quality and retaining the image details.For quantitative analysis,the test with 120 underwater images showed that for the proposed method,the mean square error(MSE),peak signal to noise ratio(PSNR),and entropy were 49.2098,13.3909,and 6.6815,respectively.The proposed method outperformed three established methods in enhancing the visual quality of sea cucumber underwater gray image.