Twin Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Underwater Image Enhancement and Beyond

Underwater images suffer from severe distortion, which degrades the accuracy of object detection performed in an underwater environment. Existing underwater image enhancement algorithms focus on the restoration of contrast and scene reflection. In practice, the enhanced images may not benefit the effectiveness of detection and even lead to a severe performance drop. In this paper, we propose an object-guided twin adversarial contrastive learning based underwater enhancement method to achieve both visual-friendly and task-orientated enhancement. Concretely, we first develop a bilateral constrained closed-loop adversarial enhancement module, which eases the requirement of paired data with the unsupervised manner and preserves more informative features by coupling with the twin inverse mapping. In addition, to confer the restored images with a more realistic appearance, we also adopt the contrastive cues in the training phase. To narrow the gap between visually-oriented and detection-favorable target images, a task-aware feedback module is embedded in the enhancement process, where the coherent gradient information of the detector is incorporated to guide the enhancement towards the detection-pleasing direction. To validate the performance, we allocate a series of prolific detectors into our framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the enhanced results of our method show remarkable amelioration in visual quality, the accuracy of different detectors conducted on our enhanced images has been promoted notably. Moreover, we also conduct a study on semantic segmentation to illustrate how object guidance improves high-level tasks. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Jzy2017/TACL.