# UStyle: Waterbody Style Transfer of Underwater Scenes by Depth-Guided Feature Synthesis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11893 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11893/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 69 of its 147 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 69)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [Instance Normalization: The Missing Ingredient for Fast Stylization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08022/) (2016)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Transformer in Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00112/) (2021)
- [An Introduction to Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.08458/) (2015)
- [A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.06576/) (2015)
- [Universal Style Transfer via Feature Transforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08086/) (2017)
- [Inversion-Based Style Transfer with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13203/) (2022)
- [An Underwater Image Enhancement Benchmark Dataset and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05495/) (2019)
- [CLIPstyler: Image Style Transfer with a Single Text Condition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00374/) (2021)
- [Neural Style Transfer: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.04058/) (2017)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer with Style-Attentional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02342/) (2018)
- [Style Injection in Diffusion: A Training-free Approach for Adapting Large-scale Diffusion Models for Style Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09008/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [WaterGen: Decoupling Scene and Medium in Underwater Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.31147/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The concept of waterbody style transfer remains largely unexplored in the underwater imaging and vision literature. Traditional image style transfer (STx) methods primarily focus on artistic and photorealistic blending, often failing to preserve object and scene geometry in images captured in high-scattering mediums such as underwater. The wavelength-dependent nonlinear attenuation and depth-dependent backscattering artifacts further complicate learning underwater image STx from unpaired data. This paper introduces UStyle, the first data-driven learning framework for transferring waterbody styles across underwater images without requiring prior reference images or scene information. We propose a novel depth-aware whitening and coloring transform (DA-WCT) mechanism that integrates physics-based waterbody synthesis to ensure perceptually consistent stylization while preserving scene structure. To enhance style transfer quality, we incorporate carefully designed loss functions that guide UStyle to maintain colorfulness, lightness, structural integrity, and frequency-domain characteristics, as well as high-level content in VGG and CLIP (contrastive language-image pretraining) feature spaces. By addressing domain-specific challenges, UStyle provides a robust framework for no-reference underwater image STx, surpassing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods that rely solely on end-to-end reconstruction loss. Furthermore, we introduce the UF7D dataset, a curated collection of high-resolution underwater images spanning seven distinct waterbody styles, establishing a benchmark to support future research in underwater image STx. The UStyle inference pipeline and UF7D dataset are released at: https://github.com/uf-robopi/UStyle.