# Learning A Physical-aware Diffusion Model Based on Transformer for Underwater Image Enhancement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01497 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.01497/

## Key facts

- Cited by 25 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Inverse problems and image restoration, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 47 of its 90 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Inverse problems and image restoration](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/inverse-problems-and-image-restoration/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [ILVR: Conditioning Method for Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02938/) (2021)
- [Zero-Shot Image Restoration Using Denoising Diffusion Null-Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00490/) (2022)
- [Learning Continuous Image Representation with Local Implicit Image Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09161/) (2020)
- [Dynamic Convolution: Attention over Convolution Kernels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03458/) (2019)
- [An Underwater Image Enhancement Benchmark Dataset and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05495/) (2019)
- [Restoring Vision in Adverse Weather Conditions with Patch-Based Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14626/) (2022)
- [Fast Underwater Image Enhancement for Improved Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09766/) (2019)
- [TF-ICON: Diffusion-Based Training-Free Cross-Domain Image Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12493/) (2023)
- [Implicit Neural Representations for Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04267/) (2021)
- [Underwater Image Enhancement via Medium Transmission-Guided Multi-Color Space Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13015/) (2021)
- [Local Texture Estimator for Implicit Representation Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.08918/) (2021)
- [MIGC: Multi-Instance Generation Controller for Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05408/) (2024)
- [Diff-Retinex: Rethinking Low-light Image Enhancement with A Generative Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13164/) (2023)
- [U-shape Transformer for Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11843/) (2021)
- [Enhancing Underwater Imagery using Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04011/) (2018)
- [Implicit Neural Representation for Cooperative Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11722/) (2023)
- [Wavelet-based Fourier Information Interaction with Frequency Diffusion Adjustment for Underwater Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16845/) (2023)
- [Curricular Contrastive Regularization for Physics-aware Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14218/) (2023)
- [Deep Dense Multi-scale Network for Snow Removal Using Semantic and Geometric Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11298/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Diffusion Models For Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10028/) (2023)
- [GridFormer: Residual Dense Transformer with Grid Structure for Image Restoration in Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17863/) (2023)
- [Adversarial Spatio-Temporal Learning for Video Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00533/) (2018)
- [Uncertainty Inspired Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09689/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [MACE: Mass Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06135/) (2024)
- [Robust Watermarking Using Generative Priors Against Image Editing: From Benchmarking to Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18775/) (2024)
- [3DIS: Depth-Driven Decoupled Instance Synthesis for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12669/) (2024)
- [MIGC++: Advanced Multi-Instance Generation Controller for Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02329/) (2024)
- [Does FLUX Already Know How to Perform Physically Plausible Image Composition?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21278/) (2025)
- [DragFlow: Unleashing DiT Priors with Region Based Supervision for Drag Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02253/) (2025)
- [DreamRenderer: Taming Multi-Instance Attribute Control in Large-Scale Text-to-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12885/) (2025)
- [From Zero to Detail: Deconstructing Ultra-High-Definition Image Restoration from Progressive Spectral Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13165/) (2025)
- [UltraHR-100K: Enhancing UHR Image Synthesis with A Large-Scale High-Quality Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20661/) (2025)
- [LUVE : Latent-Cascaded Ultra-High-Resolution Video Generation with Dual Frequency Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11564/) (2026)
- [BideDPO: Conditional Image Generation with Simultaneous Text and Condition Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19268/) (2025)
- [L2P: Unlocking Latent Potential for Pixel Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12013/) (2026)
- [From Zero to Detail: A Progressive Spectral Decoupling Paradigm for UHD Image Restoration with New Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15654/) (2026)
- [RefineAnything: Multimodal Region-Specific Refinement for Perfect Local Details](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06870/) (2026)
- [Temporal and Cross-Modal Alignment for Enhanced Audiovisual Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01667/) (2026)
- [Cycle Contrastive Adversarial Learning for Unsupervised image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11750/) (2024)
- [Marine Saliency Segmenter: Object-Focused Conditional Diffusion with Region-Level Semantic Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02391/) (2025)
- [DICArt: Advancing Category-level Articulated Object Pose Estimation in Discrete State-Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19565/) (2026)
- [Spiking Pyramid Wavelet Transformation for High-efficient and Low-energy Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18644/) (2026)
- [Physics Informed Capsule Enhanced Variational AutoEncoder for Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04753/) (2025)
- [TIDE: Two-Stage Inverse Degradation Estimation with Guided Prior Disentanglement for Underwater Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07171/) (2025)
- [LOBSTgER-enhance: an underwater image enhancement pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05163/) (2026)
- [Two-Stage Teacher-Student Reliable Prior Learning for Robust Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00137/) (2026)
- [SynVAR: Synergizing Spatial and Semantic Alignment in Visual Autoregressive Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07948/) (2026)
- [Structured Stateful Relational Scripts with a High-Quality Dataset for Multi-Shot Audio-Visual Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15512/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Underwater visuals undergo various complex degradations, inevitably influencing the efficiency of underwater vision tasks. Recently, diffusion models were employed to underwater image enhancement (UIE) tasks, and gained SOTA performance. However, these methods fail to consider the physical properties and underwater imaging mechanisms in the diffusion process, limiting information completion capacity of diffusion models. In this paper, we introduce a novel UIE framework, named PA-Diff, designed to exploiting the knowledge of physics to guide the diffusion process. PA-Diff consists of Physics Prior Generation (PPG) Branch, Implicit Neural Reconstruction (INR) Branch, and Physics-aware Diffusion Transformer (PDT) Branch. Our designed PPG branch aims to produce the prior knowledge of physics. With utilizing the physics prior knowledge to guide the diffusion process, PDT branch can obtain underwater-aware ability and model the complex distribution in real-world underwater scenes. INR Branch can learn robust feature representations from diverse underwater image via implicit neural representation, which reduces the difficulty of restoration for PDT branch. Extensive experiments prove that our method achieves best performance on UIE tasks.