TIDE: Two-Stage Inverse Degradation Estimation with Guided Prior Disentanglement for Underwater Image Restoration

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Venkatraman, Shravan, Madavan, Rakesh Raj, S, Pavan Kumar, Kavitha, Muthu Subash
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Venkatraman, Shravan
Madavan, Rakesh Raj
S, Pavan Kumar
Kavitha, Muthu Subash
author_facet Venkatraman, Shravan
Madavan, Rakesh Raj
S, Pavan Kumar
Kavitha, Muthu Subash
contents Underwater image restoration is essential for marine applications ranging from ecological monitoring to archaeological surveys, but effectively addressing the complex and spatially varying nature of underwater degradations remains a challenge. Existing methods typically apply uniform restoration strategies across the entire image, struggling to handle multiple co-occurring degradations that vary spatially and with water conditions. We introduce TIDE, a $\underline{t}$wo stage $\underline{i}$nverse $\underline{d}$egradation $\underline{e}$stimation framework that explicitly models degradation characteristics and applies targeted restoration through specialized prior decomposition. Our approach disentangles the restoration process into multiple specialized hypotheses that are adaptively fused based on local degradation patterns, followed by a progressive refinement stage that corrects residual artifacts. Specifically, TIDE decomposes underwater degradations into four key factors, namely color distortion, haze, detail loss, and noise, and designs restoration experts specialized for each. By generating specialized restoration hypotheses, TIDE balances competing degradation factors and produces natural results even in highly degraded regions. Extensive experiments across both standard benchmarks and challenging turbid water conditions show that TIDE achieves competitive performance on reference based fidelity metrics while outperforming state of the art methods on non reference perceptual quality metrics, with strong improvements in color correction and contrast enhancement. Our code is available at: https://rakesh-123-cryp.github.io/TIDE.
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle TIDE: Two-Stage Inverse Degradation Estimation with Guided Prior Disentanglement for Underwater Image Restoration
Venkatraman, Shravan
Madavan, Rakesh Raj
S, Pavan Kumar
Kavitha, Muthu Subash
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Underwater image restoration is essential for marine applications ranging from ecological monitoring to archaeological surveys, but effectively addressing the complex and spatially varying nature of underwater degradations remains a challenge. Existing methods typically apply uniform restoration strategies across the entire image, struggling to handle multiple co-occurring degradations that vary spatially and with water conditions. We introduce TIDE, a $\underline{t}$wo stage $\underline{i}$nverse $\underline{d}$egradation $\underline{e}$stimation framework that explicitly models degradation characteristics and applies targeted restoration through specialized prior decomposition. Our approach disentangles the restoration process into multiple specialized hypotheses that are adaptively fused based on local degradation patterns, followed by a progressive refinement stage that corrects residual artifacts. Specifically, TIDE decomposes underwater degradations into four key factors, namely color distortion, haze, detail loss, and noise, and designs restoration experts specialized for each. By generating specialized restoration hypotheses, TIDE balances competing degradation factors and produces natural results even in highly degraded regions. Extensive experiments across both standard benchmarks and challenging turbid water conditions show that TIDE achieves competitive performance on reference based fidelity metrics while outperforming state of the art methods on non reference perceptual quality metrics, with strong improvements in color correction and contrast enhancement. Our code is available at: https://rakesh-123-cryp.github.io/TIDE.
title TIDE: Two-Stage Inverse Degradation Estimation with Guided Prior Disentanglement for Underwater Image Restoration
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07171