Underwater Image Enhancement with Multi-Scale Residual Attention Network

Abstract

Underwater images suffer from low contrast, color distortion and visibility degradation due to the light scattering and attenuation. Over the past few years, the importance of underwater image enhancement has increased because of ocean engineering and underwater robotics. Existing underwater image enhancement methods are based on various assumptions. However, it is almost impossible to define appropriate assumptions for underwater images due to the diversity of underwater images. Therefore, they are only effective for specific types of underwater images. Recently, underwater image enhancement algorisms using CNNs and GANS have been proposed, but they are not as advanced as other image processing methods due to the lack of suitable training data sets and the complexity of the issues. To solve the problems, we propose a novel underwater image enhancement method which combines the residual feature attention block and novel combination of multi-scale and multi-patch structure. Multi-patch network extracts local features to adjust to various underwater images which are often Non-homogeneous. In addition, our network includes multi-scale network which is often effective for image restoration. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms the conventional method for various types of images.