iDehaze: Supervised Underwater Image Enhancement and Dehazing via Physically Accurate Photorealistic Simulations

Underwater image enhancement and turbidity removal (dehazing) is a very challenging problem, not only due to the sheer variety of environments where it is applicable, but also due to the lack of high-resolution, labelled image data. In this paper, we present a novel, two-step deep learning approach for underwater image dehazing and colour correction. In iDehaze, we leverage computer graphics to physically model light propagation in underwater conditions. Specifically, we construct a three-dimensional, photorealistic simulation of underwater environments, and use them to gather a large supervised training dataset. We then train a deep convolutional neural network to remove the haze in these images, then train a second network to transform the colour space of the dehazed images onto a target domain. Experiments demonstrate that our two-step iDehaze method is substantially more effective at producing high-quality underwater images, achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets. Code, data and benchmarks will be open sourced.