Underwater Image Enhancement Based on Color Feature Fusion

Abstract

The ever-changing underwater environment, coupled with the complex degradation modes of underwater images, poses numerous challenges to underwater image enhancement efforts. Addressing the issues of low contrast and significant color deviations in underwater images, this paper presents an underwater image enhancement approach based on color feature fusion. By leveraging the properties of light propagation underwater, the proposed model employs a multi-channel feature extraction strategy, using convolution blocks of varying sizes to extract features from the red, green, and blue channels, thus effectively learning both global and local information of underwater images. Moreover, an attention mechanism is incorporated to design a residual enhancement module, augmenting the capability of feature representation. Lastly, a dynamic feature enhancement module is designed using deformable convolutions, enabling the network to capture underwater scene information with higher precision. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate the outstanding performance of our proposed method in underwater image enhancement. Further, object detection experiments conducted on pre- and post-enhanced images underscore the value of our method for downstream tasks.