← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2608.00137 · v4
RPL-UIE: Reference-Guided Prior Learning for Content-Preserving Underwater Image Enhancement
首次提交 2026-07-31 22:30
版本更新 2026-11-05 14:32
雷达观测 2026-11-06 12:09
摘要
Underwater image enhancement (UIE) aims to recover clear images from observations degraded by wavelength-dependent absorption, scattering, and spatially nonuniform degradation. Although existing generative methods can handle complex degradations, they may still generate visually appealing results while compromising content preservation, thereby degrading downstream visual perception. To improve content preservation, we extract spatial priors characterizing appearance and photometric properties from ground-truth images to provide stable guidance for enhancement. To bridge the gap between training with ground-truth references and inference without references, we propose reference-guided prior learning for underwater image enhancement (RPL-UIE), a two-stage teacher-student framework. The teacher network extracts stable priors from ground-truth images, while the student network takes only degraded images as input and learns to mimic the teacher's prior extraction capability. We further design Residual Prior Refinement Diffusion (RPRD) and Frequency-Aware Prior Residual Calibration (FPRC) to reduce the prior discrepancy between the teacher and student. RPRD progressively predicts corrections in the residual space, while FPRC preserves stable low-frequency residuals and selectively modulates high-frequency details. Experiments on multiple underwater image datasets show that RPL-UIE achieves competitive enhancement performance. For the engineering application of underwater visual perception, downstream object detection and instance segmentation experiments show that RPL-UIE improves visual quality while better preserving object structures and semantic content needed for reliable perception. Tests on real-world data collected by a custom-built remotely operated vehicle (ROV) further demonstrate its effectiveness and practical applicability.
作者备注：19 pages, 10 figures
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v4 · 2026-11-05 14:32 · 最新观测版本
RPL-UIE: Reference-Guided Prior Learning for Content-Preserving Underwater Image Enhancement
Underwater image enhancement (UIE) aims to recover clear images from observations degraded by wavelength-dependent absorption, scattering, and spatially nonuniform degradation. Although existing generative methods can handle complex degradations, they may still generate visually appealing results while compromising content preservation, thereby degrading downstream visual perception. To improve content preservation, we extract spatial priors characterizing appearance and photometric properties from ground-truth images to provide stable guidance for enhancement. To bridge the gap between training with ground-truth references and inference without references, we propose reference-guided prior learning for underwater image enhancement (RPL-UIE), a two-stage teacher-student framework. The teacher network extracts stable priors from ground-truth images, while the student network takes only degraded images as input and learns to mimic the teacher's prior extraction capability. We further design Residual Prior Refinement Diffusion (RPRD) and Frequency-Aware Prior Residual Calibration (FPRC) to reduce the prior discrepancy between the teacher and student. RPRD progressively predicts corrections in the residual space, while FPRC preserves stable low-frequency residuals and selectively modulates high-frequency details. Experiments on multiple underwater image datasets show that RPL-UIE achieves competitive enhancement performance. For the engineering application of underwater visual perception, downstream object detection and instance segmentation experiments show that RPL-UIE improves visual quality while better preserving object structures and semantic content needed for reliable perception. Tests on real-world data collected by a custom-built remotely operated vehicle (ROV) further demonstrate its effectiveness and practical applicability.
查看此版本解读 →查看此版本原文 ↗v3 · 2026-11-04 11:45
Two-Stage Teacher-Student Reliable Prior Learning for Robust Underwater Image Enhancement
Underwater image enhancement (UIE) aims to recover clear images from observations affected by wavelength-dependent absorption, scattering, and spatially nonuniform degradation. Although existing generative methods can handle complex degradations, severe information loss may lead to semantic drift in the restored results. To address this issue, we propose RPL-UIE, a two-stage teacher--student framework for reliable prior learning. In the teacher stage, the network learns reliable and complementary spatial priors characterizing appearance and photometric properties from paired degraded and reference images. In the student stage, the network takes only degraded images as input and learns to emulate the teacher's prior extraction capability, thereby providing more reliable restoration guidance for the enhancement process without requiring reference images at inference. To reduce the prior-learning discrepancy between the teacher and student models, we further develop Residual Prior Refinement Diffusion (RPRD) and Frequency-Aware Prior Residual Calibration (FPRC). RPRD uses the coarse priors as anchors and progressively predicts the necessary corrections in the residual space. FPRC retains stable low-frequency residual components and selectively modulates high-frequency detail residuals, producing calibrated priors to support high-quality reconstruction. Experiments on multiple UIE benchmarks demonstrate competitive restoration performance. Downstream underwater object detection and instance segmentation experiments further demonstrate the improved utility of enhanced images for visual perception, while tests on real-world data captured by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) support the robustness and practical applicability of RPL-UIE.
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