# Underwater Image Enhancement via Medium Transmission-Guided Multi-Color Space Embedding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.13015 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13015/

## Key facts

- Cited by 134 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [Accurate Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04587/) (2015)
- [Zero-Reference Deep Curve Estimation for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06826/) (2020)
- [An Underwater Image Enhancement Benchmark Dataset and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05495/) (2019)
- [Learning to Enhance Low-Light Image via Zero-Reference Deep Curve Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00860/) (2021)
- [WaterGAN: Unsupervised Generative Network to Enable Real-time Color Correction of Monocular Underwater Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.07392/) (2017)
- [Underwater Single Image Color Restoration Using Haze-Lines and a New Quantitative Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01343/) (2018)
- [Real-world Underwater Enhancement: Challenges, Benchmarks, and Solutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05320/) (2019)
- [Nested Network with Two-Stream Pyramid for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08462/) (2019)
- [Emerging from Water: Underwater Image Color Correction Based on Weakly Supervised Color Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07084/) (2017)
- [Diving Deeper into Underwater Image Enhancement: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07863/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 134)

- [U-shape Transformer for Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11843/) (2021)
- [Wavelet-based Fourier Information Interaction with Frequency Diffusion Adjustment for Underwater Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16845/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Semi-supervised Learning for Underwater Image Restoration via Reliable Bank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09101/) (2023)
- [Reti-Diff: Illumination Degradation Image Restoration with Retinex-based Latent Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11638/) (2023)
- [Underwater Ranker: Learn Which Is Better and How to Be Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06857/) (2022)
- [Uncertainty Inspired Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09689/) (2022)
- [PUGAN: Physical Model-Guided Underwater Image Enhancement Using GAN with Dual-Discriminators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08918/) (2023)
- [CIR-Net: Cross-modality Interaction and Refinement for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02843/) (2022)
- [Does Thermal Really Always Matter for RGB-T Salient Object Detection?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04266/) (2022)
- [Domain Adaptation for Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09650/) (2021)
- [SGUIE-Net: Semantic Attention Guided Underwater Image Enhancement with Multi-Scale Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02832/) (2022)
- [Underwater Image Enhancement by Transformer-based Diffusion Model with Non-uniform Sampling for Skip Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03445/) (2023)
- [Learning A Physical-aware Diffusion Model Based on Transformer for Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01497/) (2024)
- [Wavelength-based Attributed Deep Neural Network for Underwater Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07910/) (2021)
- [SyreaNet: A Physically Guided Underwater Image Enhancement Framework Integrating Synthetic and Real Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08269/) (2023)
- [Five A+ Network: You Only Need 9K Parameters for Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08824/) (2023)
- [UniUIR: Considering Underwater Image Restoration as An All-in-One Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12981/) (2025)
- [Underwater Image Restoration Through a Prior Guided Hybrid Sense Approach and Extensive Benchmark Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02701/) (2025)
- [A Wavelet-based Dual-stream Network for Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08758/) (2022)
- [BCS-Net: Boundary, Context and Semantic for Automatic COVID-19 Lung Infection Segmentation from CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.08114/) (2022)
- [A Generalized Physical-knowledge-guided Dynamic Model for Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05447/) (2023)
- [Phaseformer: Phase-based Attention Mechanism for Underwater Image Restoration and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01456/) (2024)
- [Underwater Image Restoration via Polymorphic Large Kernel CNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18459/) (2024)
- [Osmosis: RGBD Diffusion Prior for Underwater Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14837/) (2024)
- [PSNet: Parallel Symmetric Network for Video Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05912/) (2022)
- [Deep Image Harmonization in Dual Color Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02813/) (2023)
- [Under-Display Camera Image Restoration with Scattering Effect](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04163/) (2023)
- [Boundary Guided Semantic Learning for Real-time COVID-19 Lung Infection Segmentation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02934/) (2022)
- [Synergistic Multiscale Detail Refinement via Intrinsic Supervision for Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11932/) (2023)
- [UWFormer: Underwater Image Enhancement via a Semi-Supervised Multi-Scale Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.20210/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Underwater images suffer from color casts and low contrast due to wavelength- and distance-dependent attenuation and scattering. To solve these two degradation issues, we present an underwater image enhancement network via medium transmission-guided multi-color space embedding, called Ucolor. Concretely, we first propose a multi-color space encoder network, which enriches the diversity of feature representations by incorporating the characteristics of different color spaces into a unified structure. Coupled with an attention mechanism, the most discriminative features extracted from multiple color spaces are adaptively integrated and highlighted. Inspired by underwater imaging physical models, we design a medium transmission (indicating the percentage of the scene radiance reaching the camera)-guided decoder network to enhance the response of the network towards quality-degraded regions. As a result, our network can effectively improve the visual quality of underwater images by exploiting multiple color spaces embedding and the advantages of both physical model-based and learning-based methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Ucolor achieves superior performance against state-of-the-art methods in terms of both visual quality and quantitative metrics.