SGUIE-Net: Semantic Attention Guided Underwater Image Enhancement with Multi-Scale Perception

Due to the wavelength-dependent light attenuation, refraction and scattering, underwater images usually suffer from color distortion and blurred details. However, due to the limited number of paired underwater images with undistorted images as reference, training deep enhancement models for diverse degradation types is quite difficult. To boost the performance of data-driven approaches, it is essential to establish more effective learning mechanisms that mine richer supervised information from limited training sample resources. In this paper, we propose a novel underwater image enhancement network, called SGUIE-Net, in which we introduce semantic information as high-level guidance via region-wise enhancement feature learning. Accordingly, we propose semantic region-wise enhancement module to better learn local enhancement features for semantic regions with multi-scale perception. After using them as complementary features and feeding them to the main branch, which extracts the global enhancement features on the original image scale, the fused features bring semantically consistent and visually superior enhancements. Extensive experiments on the publicly available datasets and our proposed dataset demonstrate the impressive performance of SGUIE-Net. The code and proposed dataset are available at https://trentqq.github.io/SGUIE-Net.html.