Underwater Organism Color Fine-Tuning via Decomposition and Guidance

Due to the wavelength dependent light attenuation and scattering, the color of the underwater organism usually appears distorted. The existing underwater image enhancement methods mainly focus on designing networks capable of generating enhanced underwater organisms with fixed color. Due to the complexity of the underwater environment, ground truth labels are difficult to obtain, which results in the non-existence of perfect enhancement effects. Different from the existing methods, this paper proposes an algorithm with color enhancement and color fine-tuning (CECF) capabilities. The color enhancement behavior of CECF is the same as that of existing methods, aiming to restore the color of the distorted underwater organism. Beyond this general purpose, the color fine-tuning behavior of CECF can adjust the color of organisms in a controlled manner, which can generate enhanced organisms with diverse colors. To achieve this purpose, four processes are used in CECF. A supervised enhancement process learns the mapping from a distorted image to an enhanced image by the decomposition of color code. A self reconstruction process and a cross-reconstruction process are used for content-invariant learning. A color fine-tuning process is designed based on the guidance for obtaining various enhanced results with different colors. Experimental results have proven the enhancement ability and color fine-tuning ability of the proposed CECF. The source code is provided in https://github.com/Xiaofeng-life/CECF.