A Multi-Stage Progressive Network with Feature Transmission and Fusion for Marine Snow Removal

Improving underwater image quality is crucial for marine detection applications. However, in the marine environment, captured images are often affected by various degradation factors due to the complexity of underwater conditions. In addition to common color distortions, marine snow noise in underwater images is also a significant issue. The backscatter of artificial light on marine snow generates specks in images, thereby affecting image quality, scene perception, and subsequently impacting downstream tasks such as target detection and segmentation. Addressing the issues caused by marine snow noise, we have designed a new network structure. In this work, a novel skip-connection structure called a dual channel multi-scale feature transmitter (DCMFT) is implemented to reduce information loss during downsampling in the feature encoding and decoding section. Additionally, in the feature transfer process for each stage, iterative attentional feature fusion (iAFF) modules are inserted to fully utilize marine snow features extracted at different stages. Finally, to further optimize the network's performance, we incorporate the multi-scale structural similarity index (MS-SSIM) into the loss function to ensure more effective convergence during training. Through experiments conducted on the Marine Snow Removal Benchmark (MSRB) dataset with an augmented sample size, our method has achieved significant results. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach excels in removing marine snow noise, with a peak signal-to-noise ratio reaching 38.9251 dB, significantly outperforming existing methods.