Removing nonrigid refractive distortions for underwater images using an attention-based deep neural network

Abstract

Refractive distortions in underwater images usually occur when these images are captured through a dynamic refractive water surface, such as unmanned aerial vehicles capturing shallow underwater scenes from the surface of water or autonomous underwater vehicles observing floating platforms in the air. We propose an end-to-end deep neural network for learning to restore real scene images for removing refractive distortions. This network adopts an encoder-decoder architecture with a specially designed attention module. The use of the attention image and the distortion field generated by the proposed deep neural network can restore the exact distorted areas in more detail. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results show that the proposed framework effectively eliminates refractive distortions and refines image details. We also test the proposed framework in practical applications by embedding it into an NVIDIA JETSON TX2 platform, and the results demonstrate the practical value of the proposed framework.