# IA2U: A Transfer Plugin with Multi-Prior for In-Air Model to Underwater

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06955 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06955/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [FCOS: Fully Convolutional One-Stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01355/) (2019)
- [Conditional Prompt Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05557/) (2022)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Simple Baselines for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04676/) (2022)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02424/) (2019)
- [FFA-Net: Feature Fusion Attention Network for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07559/) (2019)
- [An Underwater Image Enhancement Benchmark Dataset and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05495/) (2019)
- [TOOD: Task-aligned One-stage Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07755/) (2021)
- [Probabilistic Anchor Assignment with IoU Prediction for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08103/) (2020)
- [Underwater Image Enhancement via Medium Transmission-Guided Multi-Color Space Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13015/) (2021)
- [Contrastive Semi-supervised Learning for Underwater Image Restoration via Reliable Bank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09101/) (2023)
- [Underwater Ranker: Learn Which Is Better and How to Be Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06857/) (2022)
- [Learning Semantic-Aware Knowledge Guidance for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07039/) (2023)
- [Scale-Aware Modulation Meet Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08579/) (2023)
- [Shallow-UWnet : Compressed Model for Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02073/) (2021)
- [SGUIE-Net: Semantic Attention Guided Underwater Image Enhancement with Multi-Scale Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02832/) (2022)
- [Five A+ Network: You Only Need 9K Parameters for Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08824/) (2023)
- [FeatEnHancer: Enhancing Hierarchical Features for Object Detection and Beyond Under Low-Light Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03594/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In underwater environments, variations in suspended particle concentration and turbidity cause severe image degradation, posing significant challenges to image enhancement (IE) and object detection (OD) tasks. Currently, in-air image enhancement and detection methods have made notable progress, but their application in underwater conditions is limited due to the complexity and variability of these environments. Fine-tuning in-air models saves high overhead and has more optional reference work than building an underwater model from scratch. To address these issues, we design a transfer plugin with multiple priors for converting in-air models to underwater applications, named IA2U. IA2U enables efficient application in underwater scenarios, thereby improving performance in Underwater IE and OD. IA2U integrates three types of underwater priors: the water type prior that characterizes the degree of image degradation, such as color and visibility; the degradation prior, focusing on differences in details and textures; and the sample prior, considering the environmental conditions at the time of capture and the characteristics of the photographed object. Utilizing a Transformer-like structure, IA2U employs these priors as query conditions and a joint task loss function to achieve hierarchical enhancement of task-level underwater image features, therefore considering the requirements of two different tasks, IE and OD. Experimental results show that IA2U combined with an in-air model can achieve superior performance in underwater image enhancement and object detection tasks. The code will be made publicly available.
