A deep CNN method for underwater image enhancement

Underwater images often suffer from color distortion and visibility degradation due to the light absorption and scattering. Existing methods utilize various assumptions/constrains to achieve reasonable solutions for underwater image enhancement. However, these methods share the common limitation that the adopted assumptions may not work for some particular scenes. To address this problem, this paper proposes an end to end framework for underwater image enhancement, where a CNN-based network called UIE-Net is presented. The UIE-net is trained with two tasks, color correction and haze removal. This unified training approach enables learning a strong feature representation for both tasks simultaneously. For better extracting the inherent features in local patches, a pixels disrupting strategy is exploited in the proposed learning framework, which significantly improves the convergent speed and accuracy. To handle the training of UIE-net, we synthesize 200000 training images based on the physical underwater imaging model. Experiments on benchmark underwater images for cross-scenes show that UIE-net achieves superior performance over existing methods.