UID2021: An Underwater Image Dataset for Evaluation of No-Reference Quality Assessment Metrics

Achieving subjective and objective quality assessment of underwater images is of high significance in underwater visual perception and image/video processing. However, the development of underwater image quality assessment (UIQA) is limited for the lack of publicly available underwater image datasets with human subjective scores and reliable objective UIQA metrics. To address this issue, we establish a large-scale underwater image dataset, dubbed UID2021, for evaluating no-reference (NR) UIQA metrics. The constructed dataset contains 60 multiply degraded underwater images collected from various sources, covering six common underwater scenes (i.e., bluish scene, blue-green scene, greenish scene, hazy scene, low-light scene, and turbid scene), and their corresponding 900 quality improved versions are generated by employing 15 state-of-the-art underwater image enhancement and restoration algorithms. Mean opinion scores with 52 observers for each image of UID2021 are also obtained by using the pairwise comparison sorting method. Both in-air and underwater-specific NR IQA algorithms are tested on our constructed dataset to fairly compare their performance and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. Our proposed UID2021 dataset enables ones to evaluate NR UIQA algorithms comprehensively and paves the way for further research on UIQA. The dataset is available at https://github.com/Hou-Guojia/UID2021.