Papers › Underwater Image Restoration via Contrastive Learning and a Real-world Dataset

Underwater Image Restoration via Contrastive Learning and a Real-world Dataset

20 Jun 2021arXiv:2106.10718archive 2025-07-28

Junlin Han, Mehrdad Shoeiby, Tim Malthus, Elizabeth Botha, Janet Anstee, Saeed Anwar, Ran Wei, Mohammad Ali Armin, Hongdong Li, Lars Petersson

Underwater image restoration is of significant importance in unveiling the underwater world. Numerous techniques and algorithms have been developed in the past decades. However, due to fundamental difficulties associated with imaging/sensing, lighting, and refractive geometric distortions, in capturing clear underwater images, no comprehensive evaluations have been conducted of underwater image restoration. To address this gap, we have constructed a large-scale real underwater image dataset, dubbed `HICRD' (Heron Island Coral Reef Dataset), for the purpose of benchmarking existing methods and supporting the development of new deep-learning based methods. We employ accurate water parameter (diffuse attenuation coefficient) in generating reference images. There are 2000 reference restored images and 6003 original underwater images in the unpaired training set. Further, we present a novel method for underwater image restoration based on unsupervised image-to-image translation framework. Our proposed method leveraged contrastive learning and generative adversarial networks to maximize the mutual information between raw and restored images. Extensive experiments with comparisons to recent approaches further demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method. Our code and dataset are publicly available at GitHub.

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JunlinHan/CWR officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchNOASSERTION report

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BenchmarkingContrastive LearningImage RestorationImage-to-Image TranslationTranslationUnderwater Image RestorationUnsupervised Image-To-Image Translation

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HICRD

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CORALContrastive Learning

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