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Register a new userReal-world Underwater Enhancement: Challenges, Benchmarks, and Solutions
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Added by
Risheng Liu
Publication date
2019
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Underwater image enhancement is such an important low-level vision task with many applications that numerous algorithms have been proposed in recent years. These algorithms developed upon various assumptions demonstrate successes from various aspects using different data sets and different metrics. In this work, we setup an undersea image capturing system, and construct a large-scale Real-world Underwater Image Enhancement (RUIE) data set divided into three subsets. The three subsets target at three challenging aspects for enhancement, i.e., image visibility quality, color casts, and higher-level detection/classification, respectively. We conduct extensive and systematic experiments on RUIE to evaluate the effectiveness and limitations of various algorithms to enhance visibility and correct color casts on images with hierarchical categories of degradation. Moreover, underwater image enhancement in practice usually serves as a preprocessing step for mid-level and high-level vision tasks. We thus exploit the object detection performance on enhanced images as a brand new task-specific evaluation criterion. The findings from these evaluations not only confirm what is commonly believed, but also suggest promising solutions and new directions for visibility enhancement, color correction, and object detection on real-world underwater images.
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In real-world underwater environment, exploration of seabed resources, underwater archaeology, and underwater fishing rely on a variety of sensors, vision sensor is the most important one due to its high information content, non-intrusive, and passive nature. However, wavelength-dependent light attenuation and back-scattering result in color distortion and haze effect, which degrade the visibility of images. To address this problem, firstly, we proposed an unsupervised generative adversarial network (GAN) for generating realistic underwater images (color distortion and haze effect) from in-air image and depth map pairs based on improved underwater imaging model. Secondly, U-Net, which is trained efficiently using synthetic underwater dataset, is adopted for color restoration and dehazing. Our model directly reconstructs underwater clear images using end-to-end autoencoder networks, while maintaining scene content structural similarity. The results obtained by our method were compared with existing methods qualitatively and quantitatively. Experimental results obtained by the proposed model demonstrate well performance on open real-world underwater datasets, and the processing speed can reach up to 125FPS running on one NVIDIA 1060 GPU. Source code, sample datasets are made publicly available at https://github.com/infrontofme/UWGAN_UIE.
In an underwater scene, wavelength-dependent light absorption and scattering degrade the visibility of images, causing low contrast and distorted color casts. To address this problem, we propose a convolutional neural network based image enhancement model, i.e., UWCNN, which is trained efficiently using a synthetic underwater image database. Unlike the existing works that require the parameters of underwater imaging model estimation or impose inflexible frameworks applicable only for specific scenes, our model directly reconstructs the clear latent underwater image by leveraging on an automatic end-to-end and data-driven training mechanism. Compliant with underwater imaging models and optical properties of underwater scenes, we first synthesize ten different marine image databases. Then, we separately train multiple UWCNN models for each underwater image formation type. Experimental results on real-world and synthetic underwater images demonstrate that the presented method generalizes well on different underwater scenes and outperforms the existing methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. Besides, we conduct an ablation study to demonstrate the effect of each component in our network.
Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven its worth in a series of artificial domains, and is beginning to show some successes in real-world scenarios. However, much of the research advances in RL are often hard to leverage in real-world systems due to a series of assumptions that are rarely satisfied in practice. We present a set of nine unique challenges that must be addressed to productionize RL to real world problems. For each of these challenges, we specify the exact meaning of the challenge, present some approaches from the literature, and specify some metrics for evaluating that challenge. An approach that addresses all nine challenges would be applicable to a large number of real world problems. We also present an example domain that has been modified to present these challenges as a testbed for practical RL research.
Underwater image enhancement is such an important vision task due to its significance in marine engineering and aquatic robot. It is usually work as a pre-processing step to improve the performance of high level vision tasks such as underwater object detection. Even though many previous works show the underwater image enhancement algorithms can boost the detection accuracy of the detectors, no work specially focus on investigating the relationship between these two tasks. This is mainly because existing underwater datasets lack either bounding box annotations or high quality reference images, based on which detection accuracy or image quality assessment metrics are calculated. To investigate how the underwater image enhancement methods influence the following underwater object detection tasks, in this paper, we provide a large-scale underwater object detection dataset with both bounding box annotations and high quality reference images, namely OUC dataset. The OUC dataset provides a platform for researchers to comprehensive study the influence of underwater image enhancement algorithms on the underwater object detection task.
Human speech processing is inherently multimodal, where visual cues (lip movements) help to better understand the speech in noise. Lip-reading driven speech enhancement significantly outperforms benchmark audio-only approaches at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). However, at high SNRs or low levels of background noise, visual cues become fairly less effective for speech enhancement. Therefore, a more optimal, context-aware audio-visual (AV) system is required, that contextually utilises both visual and noisy audio features and effectively accounts for different noisy conditions. In this paper, we introduce a novel contextual AV switching component that contextually exploits AV cues with respect to different operating conditions to estimate clean audio, without requiring any SNR estimation. The switching module switches between visual-only (V-only), audio-only (A-only), and both AV cues at low, high and moderate SNR levels, respectively. The contextual AV switching component is developed by integrating a convolutional neural network and long-short-term memory network. For testing, the estimated clean audio features are utilised by the developed novel enhanced visually derived Wiener filter for clean audio power spectrum estimation. The contextual AV speech enhancement method is evaluated under real-world scenarios using benchmark Grid and ChiME3 corpora. For objective testing, perceptual evaluation of speech quality is used to evaluate the quality of the restored speech. For subjective testing, the standard mean-opinion-score method is used. The critical analysis and comparative study demonstrate the outperformance of proposed contextual AV approach, over A-only, V-only, spectral subtraction, and log-minimum mean square error based speech enhancement methods at both low and high SNRs, revealing its capability to tackle spectro-temporal variation in any real-world noisy condition.
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