# Medium Transmission Map Matters for Learning to Restore Real-World Underwater Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.09414 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09414/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [Self-Normalizing Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02515/) (2017)
- [Dilated Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.09914/) (2017)
- [An Underwater Image Enhancement Benchmark Dataset and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05495/) (2019)
- [Fast Underwater Image Enhancement for Improved Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09766/) (2019)
- [Understanding Convolution for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08502/) (2017)
- [Underwater Image Enhancement via Medium Transmission-Guided Multi-Color Space Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13015/) (2021)
- [WaterGAN: Unsupervised Generative Network to Enable Real-time Color Correction of Monocular Underwater Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.07392/) (2017)
- [Enhancing Underwater Imagery using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04011/) (2018)
- [Underwater Single Image Color Restoration Using Haze-Lines and a New Quantitative Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.01343/) (2018)
- [Emerging from Water: Underwater Image Color Correction Based on Weakly Supervised Color Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.07084/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Underwater visual perception is essentially important for underwater exploration, archeology, ecosystem and so on. The low illumination, light reflections, scattering, absorption and suspended particles inevitably lead to the critically degraded underwater image quality, which causes great challenges on recognizing the objects from the underwater images. The existing underwater enhancement methods that aim to promote the underwater visibility, heavily suffer from the poor image restoration performance and generalization ability. To reduce the difficulty of underwater image enhancement, we introduce the media transmission map as guidance to assist in image enhancement. We formulate the interaction between the underwater visual images and the transmission map to obtain better enhancement results. Even with simple and lightweight network configuration, the proposed method can achieve advanced results of 22.6 dB on the challenging Test-R90 with an impressive 30 times faster than the existing models. Comprehensive experimental results have demonstrated the superiority and potential on underwater perception. Paper's code is offered on: https://github.com/GroupG-yk/MTUR-Net.