Self-organized underwater image enhancement

Abstract

Underwater images captured in diverse underwater scenes exhibit varying types and degrees of degradation, including color deviations, low contrast, blurry details, etc. Single image enhancement methods tend to insufficiently address the diverse degradation issues, resulting in inappropriate results that do not align well with human visual perception or underwater color prior. To overcome these deficiencies, we develop a novel reinforcement learning framework that selects a sequence of image enhancement methods and configures their parameters in a self-organized manner for the purpose of underwater image enhancement. In contrast to end-to-end deep learning-based black-box mechanisms, the novel framework operates in a white-box fashion where the mechanisms for the method selection and parameter configuration are transparent. Furthermore, our framework incorporates the human visual perception and the underwater color prior into non-reference score increments for rewarding the underwater image enhancement. This breaks through the training limit imposed by volunteer-selected enhanced images as references. Comprehensive qualitative and quantitative experiments ultimately demonstrate that our framework outperforms nine state-of-the-art underwater image enhancement methods in terms of visual quality, and achieves better performance in five underwater image quality assessment metrics on three underwater image datasets. We release our code at https://gitee.com/wanghaoupc/Self_organized_UIE.