Underwater Image Enhancement via Medium Transmission-Guided Multi-Color Space Embedding

Abstract

Underwater images suffer from color casts and low contrast due to wavelength- and distance-dependent attenuation and scattering. To solve these two degradation issues, we present an underwater image enhancement network via medium transmission-guided multi-color space embedding, called Ucolor. Concretely, we first propose a multi-color space encoder network, which enriches the diversity of feature representations by incorporating the characteristics of different color spaces into a unified structure. Coupled with an attention mechanism, the most discriminative features extracted from multiple color spaces are adaptively integrated and highlighted. Inspired by underwater imaging physical models, we design a medium transmission (indicating the percentage of the scene radiance reaching the cam