# UniV2D: Bridging Visual Restoration and Semantic Perception for Underwater Salient Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07146 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07146/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 32 of its 91 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 32)

- [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)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)
- [U2-Net: Going Deeper with Nested U-Structure for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09007/) (2020)
- [Enhanced-alignment Measure for Binary Foreground Map Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10421/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Semantic Segmentation of Underwater Imagery: Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01241/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Perceive-IR: Learning to Perceive Degradation Better for All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15994/) (2024)
- [Domain Adaptation for Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.09650/) (2021)
- [Cross-modality Discrepant Interaction Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01971/) (2021)
- [Diving into Underwater: Segment Anything Model Guided Underwater Salient Instance Segmentation and A Large-scale Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06039/) (2024)
- [Multi-Scale and Detail-Enhanced Segment Anything Model for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04326/) (2024)
- [MFNet: Multi-filter Directive Network for Weakly Supervised Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01732/) (2021)
- [Point-aware Interaction and CNN-induced Refinement Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08930/) (2023)
- [A Simple yet Effective Network based on Vision Transformer for Camouflaged Object and Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18922/) (2024)
- [Fantastic Animals and Where to Find Them: Segment Any Marine Animal with Dual SAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04996/) (2024)
- [UniUIR: Considering Underwater Image Restoration as An All-in-One Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12981/) (2025)
- [SVAM: Saliency-guided Visual Attention Modeling by Autonomous Underwater Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06252/) (2020)
- [Recurrent Multi-scale Transformer for High-Resolution Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03826/) (2023)
- [DC-Net: Divide-and-Conquer for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14955/) (2023)
- [ClearAIR: A Human-Visual-Perception-Inspired All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02763/) (2026)
- [Object Detection in Hyperspectral Image via Unified Spectral-Spatial Feature Aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08370/) (2023)
- [Synergistic Multiscale Detail Refinement via Intrinsic Supervision for Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11932/) (2023)
- [USIS16K: High-Quality Dataset for Underwater Salient Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19472/) (2025)
- [HUPE: Heuristic Underwater Perceptual Enhancement with Semantic Collaborative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18296/) (2024)
- [UIS-Mamba: Exploring Mamba for Underwater Instance Segmentation via Dynamic Tree Scan and Hidden State Weaken](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00421/) (2025)
- [Marine Saliency Segmenter: Object-Focused Conditional Diffusion with Region-Level Semantic Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02391/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Underwater salient object detection (USOD) plays a vital role in marine vision tasks but remains fundamentally challenging due to severe visual degradation, such as selective absorption and medium scattering. Conventional pipelines typically adopt a sequential "enhance-then-detect" paradigm. However, isolating low-level visual restoration from high-level semantic perception often leads to semantic inconsistency, where the restored images may not be optimal for detection and can even introduce task-irrelevant noise. To break this sequential bottleneck, we propose UniV2D, a Unified Vision-to-Detection Network that jointly optimizes visual restoration and salient object detection within a mutually beneficial framework. Unlike traditional methods that rely on disjointed pipelines or rigid physical priors, UniV2D introduces a semantic-driven learning paradigm: high-level saliency semantics actively guide the restoration process, while the restored visual cues reciprocally enhance saliency perception. Specifically, UniV2D features a hierarchical dual-branch architecture. It first employs a self-calibrated decoder to predict initial saliency masks alongside a mask-aware restoration module to reconstruct image content. Subsequently, a saliency-guided refinement module equipped with cross-level modulation is utilized to align structural fidelity with semantic consistency. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that UniV2D significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, establishing a new standard for joint underwater perception.