Dual stream fusion network for underwater image enhancement of multi-scale turbidity restoration and multi-path color correction.

Abstract

Underwater images frequently experience color distortion and blurred details due to the absorption and scattering of light, which can hinder underwater visual tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a dual-stream fusion network for enhancing underwater images. Our multi-scale turbidity restoration module (MTRM) adopts a two-stage dehazing process from coarse to fine, while employing the SOS boosting strategy and frequency-based dense connections to further improve the performance of the U-Net. The multi-path color correction module (MCCM) utilizes the multi-path residual block as the basic unit to construct RGB enhancement paths. It selectively establishes inter-color channels through attention-based cross connections, which efficiently harness the distinctive features from various color channels. Additionally, non-local spatial and channel attention provide essential correlation information for the final fusion stage. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations conducted on various underwater datasets have demonstrated the excellent performance of our method.