USLN: A statistically guided lightweight network for underwater image enhancement via dual-statistic white balance and multi-color space stretch

Underwater images are inevitably affected by color distortion and reduced contrast. Traditional statistic-based methods such as white balance and histogram stretching attempted to adjust the imbalance of color channels and narrow distribution of intensities a priori thus with limited performance. Recently, deep-learning-based methods have achieved encouraging results. However, the involved complicate architecture and high computational costs may hinder their deployment in practical constrained platforms. Inspired by above works, we propose a statistically guided lightweight underwater image enhancement network (USLN). Concretely, we first develop a dual-statistic white balance module which can learn to use both average and maximum of images to compensate the color distortion for each specific pixel. Then this is followed by a multi-color space stretch module to adjust the histogram distribution in RGB, HSI, and Lab color spaces adaptively. Extensive experiments show that, with the guidance of statistics, USLN significantly reduces the required network capacity (over98%) and achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code and relevant resources are available at https://github.com/deepxzy/USLN.

DeepLofargram: A Deep Learning based Fluctuating Dim Frequency Line Detection and Recovery

This paper investigates the problem of dim frequency line detection and recovery in the so-called lofargram. Theoretically, time integration long enough can always enhance the detection characteristic. But this does not hold for irregularly fluctuating lines. Deep learning has been shown to perform very well for sophisticated visual inference tasks. With the composition of multiple processing layers, very complex high level representation that amplify the important aspects of input while suppresses irrelevant variations can be learned. Hence we propose a new DeepLofargram, composed of deep convolutional neural network and its visualization counterpart. Plugging into specifically designed multi-task loss, an end-to-end training jointly learns to detect and recover the spatial location of potential lines. Leveraging on this deep architecture, the performance boundary is -24dB on average, and -26dB for some. This is far beyond the perception of human visual and significantly improves the state-of-the-art.