Advancing Visual Reliability: Color-Accurate Underwater Image Enhancement for Real-Time Underwater Missions

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Main Authors: Zhou, Yiqiang, Chen, Yifan, Sun, Zhe, Lu, Jijun, Zheng, Ye, Li, Xuelong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Zhou, Yiqiang
Chen, Yifan
Sun, Zhe
Lu, Jijun
Zheng, Ye
Li, Xuelong
author_facet Zhou, Yiqiang
Chen, Yifan
Sun, Zhe
Lu, Jijun
Zheng, Ye
Li, Xuelong
contents Underwater image enhancement plays a crucial role in providing reliable visual information for underwater platforms, since strong absorption and scattering in water-related environments generally lead to image quality degradation. Existing high-performance methods often rely on complex architectures, which hinder deployment on underwater devices. Lightweight methods often sacrifice quality for speed and struggle to handle severely degraded underwater images. To address this limitation, we present a real-time underwater image enhancement framework with accurate color restoration. First, an Adaptive Weighted Channel Compensation module is introduced to achieve dynamic color recovery of the red and blue channels using the green channel as a reference anchor. Second, we design a Multi-branch Re-parameterized Dilated Convolution that employs multi-branch fusion during training and structural re-parameterization during inference, enabling large receptive field representation with low computational overhead. Finally, a Statistical Global Color Adjustment module is employed to optimize overall color performance based on statistical priors. Extensive experiments on eight datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance across seven evaluation metrics. The model contains only 3,880 inference parameters and achieves an inference speed of 409 FPS. Our method improves the UCIQE score by 29.7% under diverse environmental conditions, and the deployment on ROV platforms and performance gains in downstream tasks further validate its superiority for real-time underwater missions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_16363
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Advancing Visual Reliability: Color-Accurate Underwater Image Enhancement for Real-Time Underwater Missions
Zhou, Yiqiang
Chen, Yifan
Sun, Zhe
Lu, Jijun
Zheng, Ye
Li, Xuelong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Underwater image enhancement plays a crucial role in providing reliable visual information for underwater platforms, since strong absorption and scattering in water-related environments generally lead to image quality degradation. Existing high-performance methods often rely on complex architectures, which hinder deployment on underwater devices. Lightweight methods often sacrifice quality for speed and struggle to handle severely degraded underwater images. To address this limitation, we present a real-time underwater image enhancement framework with accurate color restoration. First, an Adaptive Weighted Channel Compensation module is introduced to achieve dynamic color recovery of the red and blue channels using the green channel as a reference anchor. Second, we design a Multi-branch Re-parameterized Dilated Convolution that employs multi-branch fusion during training and structural re-parameterization during inference, enabling large receptive field representation with low computational overhead. Finally, a Statistical Global Color Adjustment module is employed to optimize overall color performance based on statistical priors. Extensive experiments on eight datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance across seven evaluation metrics. The model contains only 3,880 inference parameters and achieves an inference speed of 409 FPS. Our method improves the UCIQE score by 29.7% under diverse environmental conditions, and the deployment on ROV platforms and performance gains in downstream tasks further validate its superiority for real-time underwater missions.
title Advancing Visual Reliability: Color-Accurate Underwater Image Enhancement for Real-Time Underwater Missions
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16363