AquaDiff: Diffusion-Based Underwater Image Enhancement for Addressing Color Distortion

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Shaahid, Afrah, Behzad, Muzammil
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Shaahid, Afrah
Behzad, Muzammil
author_facet Shaahid, Afrah
Behzad, Muzammil
contents Underwater images are severely degraded by wavelength-dependent light absorption and scattering, resulting in color distortion, low contrast, and loss of fine details that hinder vision-based underwater applications. To address these challenges, we propose AquaDiff, a diffusion-based underwater image enhancement framework designed to correct chromatic distortions while preserving structural and perceptual fidelity. AquaDiff integrates a chromatic prior-guided color compensation strategy with a conditional diffusion process, where cross-attention dynamically fuses degraded inputs and noisy latent states at each denoising step. An enhanced denoising backbone with residual dense blocks and multi-resolution attention captures both global color context and local details. Furthermore, a novel cross-domain consistency loss jointly enforces pixel-level accuracy, perceptual similarity, structural integrity, and frequency-domain fidelity. Extensive experiments on multiple challenging underwater benchmarks demonstrate that AquaDiff provides good results as compared to the state-of-the-art traditional, CNN-, GAN-, and diffusion-based methods, achieving superior color correction and competitive overall image quality across diverse underwater conditions.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_14760
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle AquaDiff: Diffusion-Based Underwater Image Enhancement for Addressing Color Distortion
Shaahid, Afrah
Behzad, Muzammil
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Underwater images are severely degraded by wavelength-dependent light absorption and scattering, resulting in color distortion, low contrast, and loss of fine details that hinder vision-based underwater applications. To address these challenges, we propose AquaDiff, a diffusion-based underwater image enhancement framework designed to correct chromatic distortions while preserving structural and perceptual fidelity. AquaDiff integrates a chromatic prior-guided color compensation strategy with a conditional diffusion process, where cross-attention dynamically fuses degraded inputs and noisy latent states at each denoising step. An enhanced denoising backbone with residual dense blocks and multi-resolution attention captures both global color context and local details. Furthermore, a novel cross-domain consistency loss jointly enforces pixel-level accuracy, perceptual similarity, structural integrity, and frequency-domain fidelity. Extensive experiments on multiple challenging underwater benchmarks demonstrate that AquaDiff provides good results as compared to the state-of-the-art traditional, CNN-, GAN-, and diffusion-based methods, achieving superior color correction and competitive overall image quality across diverse underwater conditions.
title AquaDiff: Diffusion-Based Underwater Image Enhancement for Addressing Color Distortion
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14760