Unsupervised underwater image enhancement via content-style representation disentanglement

The absorption and scattering properties of the water medium cause various types of distortion in underwater images, which seriously affects the accuracy and effectiveness of subsequent processing. The application of supervised learning algorithms in underwater image enhancement is limited by the difficulty of obtaining a large number of underwater paired images in practical applications. As a solution, we propose an unsupervised representation disentanglement based underwater image enhancement method (URD-UIE). URD-UIE disentangles content information (e.g., texture, semantics) and style information (e.g., chromatic aberration, blur, noise, and clarity) from underwater images and then employs the disentangled information to generate the target distortion-free image. Our proposed method URD-UIE adopts an unsupervised cycle-consistent adversarial translation architecture and combines multiple loss functions to impose specific constraints on the output results of each module to ensure the structural consistency of underwater images before and after enhancement. The experimental results demonstrate that the URD-UIE technique effectively enhances the quality of underwater images when training with unpaired data, resulting in a significant improvement in the performance of the standard model for underwater object detection and semantic segmentation.