DACA-Net: A Degradation-Aware Conditional Diffusion Network for Underwater Image Enhancement

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Huang, Chang, Cao, Jiahang, Ma, Jun, Yu, Kieren, Li, Cong, Yang, Huayong, Wu, Kaishun
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Huang, Chang
Cao, Jiahang
Ma, Jun
Yu, Kieren
Li, Cong
Yang, Huayong
Wu, Kaishun
author_facet Huang, Chang
Cao, Jiahang
Ma, Jun
Yu, Kieren
Li, Cong
Yang, Huayong
Wu, Kaishun
contents Underwater images typically suffer from severe colour distortions, low visibility, and reduced structural clarity due to complex optical effects such as scattering and absorption, which greatly degrade their visual quality and limit the performance of downstream visual perception tasks. Existing enhancement methods often struggle to adaptively handle diverse degradation conditions and fail to leverage underwater-specific physical priors effectively. In this paper, we propose a degradation-aware conditional diffusion model to enhance underwater images adaptively and robustly. Given a degraded underwater image as input, we first predict its degradation level using a lightweight dual-stream convolutional network, generating a continuous degradation score as semantic guidance. Based on this score, we introduce a novel conditional diffusion-based restoration network with a Swin UNet backbone, enabling adaptive noise scheduling and hierarchical feature refinement. To incorporate underwater-specific physical priors, we further propose a degradation-guided adaptive feature fusion module and a hybrid loss function that combines perceptual consistency, histogram matching, and feature-level contrast. Comprehensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method effectively restores underwater images with superior colour fidelity, perceptual quality, and structural details. Compared with SOTA approaches, our framework achieves significant improvements in both quantitative metrics and qualitative visual assessments.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_22501
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DACA-Net: A Degradation-Aware Conditional Diffusion Network for Underwater Image Enhancement
Huang, Chang
Cao, Jiahang
Ma, Jun
Yu, Kieren
Li, Cong
Yang, Huayong
Wu, Kaishun
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Image and Video Processing
Underwater images typically suffer from severe colour distortions, low visibility, and reduced structural clarity due to complex optical effects such as scattering and absorption, which greatly degrade their visual quality and limit the performance of downstream visual perception tasks. Existing enhancement methods often struggle to adaptively handle diverse degradation conditions and fail to leverage underwater-specific physical priors effectively. In this paper, we propose a degradation-aware conditional diffusion model to enhance underwater images adaptively and robustly. Given a degraded underwater image as input, we first predict its degradation level using a lightweight dual-stream convolutional network, generating a continuous degradation score as semantic guidance. Based on this score, we introduce a novel conditional diffusion-based restoration network with a Swin UNet backbone, enabling adaptive noise scheduling and hierarchical feature refinement. To incorporate underwater-specific physical priors, we further propose a degradation-guided adaptive feature fusion module and a hybrid loss function that combines perceptual consistency, histogram matching, and feature-level contrast. Comprehensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method effectively restores underwater images with superior colour fidelity, perceptual quality, and structural details. Compared with SOTA approaches, our framework achieves significant improvements in both quantitative metrics and qualitative visual assessments.
title DACA-Net: A Degradation-Aware Conditional Diffusion Network for Underwater Image Enhancement
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22501