5 research outputs found
HybrUR: A Hybrid Physical-Neural Solution for Unsupervised Underwater Image Restoration
Robust vision restoration for an underwater image remains a challenging
problem. For the lack of aligned underwater-terrestrial image pairs, the
unsupervised method is more suited to this task. However, the pure data-driven
unsupervised method usually has difficulty in achieving realistic color
correction for lack of optical constraint. In this paper, we propose a data-
and physics-driven unsupervised architecture that learns underwater vision
restoration from unpaired underwater-terrestrial images. For sufficient domain
transformation and detail preservation, the underwater degeneration needs to be
explicitly constructed based on the optically unambiguous physics law. Thus, we
employ the Jaffe-McGlamery degradation theory to design the generation models,
and use neural networks to describe the process of underwater degradation.
Furthermore, to overcome the problem of invalid gradient when optimizing the
hybrid physical-neural model, we fully investigate the intrinsic correlation
between the scene depth and the degradation factors for the backscattering
estimation, to improve the restoration performance through physical
constraints. Our experimental results show that the proposed method is able to
perform high-quality restoration for unconstrained underwater images without
any supervision. On multiple benchmarks, we outperform several state-of-the-art
supervised and unsupervised approaches. We also demonstrate that our methods
yield encouraging results on real-world applications