UWGAN: UNDERWATER GAN FOR REAL-WORLD UNDERWATER COLOR RESTORATION AND DEHAZING

Nan Wang, Yabin Zhou, Fenglei Han, Lichao Wan, Haitao Zhu, Yaojing Zheng

Keywords: underwater image, image restoration, image enhancement, GAN, CNNs

TL;DR: A new apporach to enhance underwater images based on GAN and CNNs

Abstract: In real-world underwater environment, exploration of seabed resources, underwater archaeology, and underwater fishing rely on a variety of sensors, vision sensor is the most important one due to its high information content, non-intrusive, and passive nature. However, wavelength-dependent light attenuation and back-scattering result in color distortion and haze effect, which degrade the visibility of images. To address this problem, firstly, we proposed an unsupervised generative adversarial network (GAN) for generating realistic underwater images (color distortion and haze effect simulation) from in-air image and depth map pairs. Secondly, U-Net, which is trained efficiently using synthetic underwater dataset, is adopted for color restoration and de-hazing. Our model directly reconstructs underwater clear images using end-to-end autoencoder networks, while maintaining scene content structural similarity. The results obtained by our method were compared with existing methods qualitatively and quantitatively. Experimental results on open real-world underwater datasets demonstrate that the presented method performs well on different actual underwater scenes, and the processing speed can reach up to 125FPS on images running on one NVIDIA 1060 GPU.

Code: https://github.com/infrontofme/UWGAN_UIE