Underwater image enhancement with latent consistency learning-based color transfer

Abstract

Due to the inevitable wavelength-dependent light absorption and forward/backward scattering, underwater images usually suffer severe color distortion and are hazy. It has become quite necessary to improve the visual quality of underwater images for both underwater observation and operation. Traditional enhancement methods and existing deep learning-based approaches to underwater image enhancement usually produce unsatisfactory results for photographs taken in complicated, wild underwater scenes. In such scenes, complex and diverse degradation-enhancement mappings are often difficult to model, especially since there are very limited samples available for learning. Inspired by the success of color-transfer techniques, it is found that clear template image-assisted color transfer is a promising strategy for underwater image enhancement, including not only color correction but also contrast and visibility improvement. Therefore, instead of directly learning the complex deep enhancement models, it is proposed to select proper color-transfer templates by learning the latent consistency between the templates and the raw underwater images. The proposed new enhancement strategy alleviates the problem caused by incomplete color-correction models and provides more stable enhancements by utilizing color transfer with consideration of global color distribution consistency and local visual contrast. Comprehensive experiments conducted on UIEB, RUIE, URPC and SQUID datasets demonstrate the good performance and great potential of the proposed new underwater image enhancement strategy.