Retinex Meets Language: A Physics-Semantics-Guided Underwater Image Enhancement Network

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Hauptverfasser: Xu, Shixuan, Liu, Yabo, Huang, Chao, Dong, Junyu, Dong, Xinghui
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Xu, Shixuan
Liu, Yabo
Huang, Chao
Dong, Junyu
Dong, Xinghui
author_facet Xu, Shixuan
Liu, Yabo
Huang, Chao
Dong, Junyu
Dong, Xinghui
contents Underwater images often suffer from severe degradation caused by light absorption and scattering, leading to color distortion, low contrast and reduced visibility. Existing Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) methods can be divided into two categories, i.e., prior-based and learning-based methods. The former rely on rigid physical assumptions that limit the adaptability, while the latter often face data scarcity and weak generalization. To address these issues, we propose a Physics-Semantics-Guided Underwater Image Enhancement Network (PSG-UIENet), which couples the Retinex-grounded illumination correction with the language-informed guidance. This network comprises a Prior-Free Illumination Estimator and a Semantics-Guided Image Restorer. In particular, the restorer leverages the textual descriptions generated by the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model to inject high-level semantics for perceptually meaningful guidance. Since multimodal UIE data sets are not publicly available, we also construct a large-scale image-text UIE data set, namely, LUIQD-TD, which contains 6,418 image-reference-text triplets. To explicitly measure and optimize semantic consistency between textual descriptions and images, we further design an Image-Text Semantic Similarity (ITSS) loss function. To our knowledge, this study makes the first effort to introduce both textual guidance and the multimodal data set into UIE tasks. Extensive experiments on our data set and four publicly available data sets demonstrate that the proposed PSG-UIENet achieves superior or comparable performance against fifteen state-of-the-art methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_07076
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Retinex Meets Language: A Physics-Semantics-Guided Underwater Image Enhancement Network
Xu, Shixuan
Liu, Yabo
Huang, Chao
Dong, Junyu
Dong, Xinghui
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Underwater images often suffer from severe degradation caused by light absorption and scattering, leading to color distortion, low contrast and reduced visibility. Existing Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) methods can be divided into two categories, i.e., prior-based and learning-based methods. The former rely on rigid physical assumptions that limit the adaptability, while the latter often face data scarcity and weak generalization. To address these issues, we propose a Physics-Semantics-Guided Underwater Image Enhancement Network (PSG-UIENet), which couples the Retinex-grounded illumination correction with the language-informed guidance. This network comprises a Prior-Free Illumination Estimator and a Semantics-Guided Image Restorer. In particular, the restorer leverages the textual descriptions generated by the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model to inject high-level semantics for perceptually meaningful guidance. Since multimodal UIE data sets are not publicly available, we also construct a large-scale image-text UIE data set, namely, LUIQD-TD, which contains 6,418 image-reference-text triplets. To explicitly measure and optimize semantic consistency between textual descriptions and images, we further design an Image-Text Semantic Similarity (ITSS) loss function. To our knowledge, this study makes the first effort to introduce both textual guidance and the multimodal data set into UIE tasks. Extensive experiments on our data set and four publicly available data sets demonstrate that the proposed PSG-UIENet achieves superior or comparable performance against fifteen state-of-the-art methods.
title Retinex Meets Language: A Physics-Semantics-Guided Underwater Image Enhancement Network
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07076