WaterPairs: a paired dataset for underwater image enhancement and underwater object detection

Abstract

Due to its importance in marine engineering and aquatic robotics, underwater image enhancement works as a preprocessing step to improve the performance of high-level vision tasks such as underwater object detection and recognition. Although several studies exhibit that underwater image enhancement algorithms can boost the detection accuracy of detectors, no work has focused on studying the relationship between these two tasks. This is mainly because current underwater datasets lack either bounding box annotations or high-quality reference images, based on which detection accuracy or image quality assessment metrics are calculated. To examine how underwater image enhancement methods affect underwater object detection tasks, we provide a large-scale underwater object detection dataset with both bounding box annotations and high-quality reference images, namely, the WaterPairs dataset. The WaterPairs dataset offers a platform for researchers to comprehensively study the influence of underwater image enhancement algorithms on underwater object detection tasks. We will release our dataset at https://github.com/IanDragon/WaterPairs once this paper is accepted.