Reinforced Swin-Convs Transformer for Simultaneous Underwater Sensing Scene Image Enhancement and Super-resolution

Underwater image enhancement (UIE) technology aims to tackle the challenge of restoring the degraded underwater images due to light absorption and scattering. Meanwhile, the ever-increasing requirement for higher resolution images from a lower resolution in the underwater domain cannot be overlooked. To address these problems, a novel U-Net-based reinforced Swin-Convs Transformer for simultaneous enhancement and superresolution (URSCT-SESR) method is proposed. Specifically, with the deficiency of U-Net based on pure convolutions, the Swin Transformer is embedded into U-Net for improving the ability to capture the global dependence. Then, given the inadequacy of the Swin Transformer capturing the local attention, the reintroduction of convolutions may capture more local attention. Thus, an ingenious manner is presented for the fusion of convolutions and the core attention mechanism to build a reinforced Swin-Convs Transformer block (RSCTB) for capturing more local attention, which is reinforced in the channel and the spatial attention of the Swin Transformer. Finally, experimental results on available datasets demonstrate that the proposed URSCT-SESR achieves the state-of-the-art performance compared with other methods in terms of both subjective and objective evaluations. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/TingdiRen/URSCT-SESR.