Underwater Image Super-Resolution via Dual-aware Integrated Network

Underwater scenes are often affected by issues such as blurred details, color distortion, and low contrast, which are primarily caused by wavelength-dependent light scattering; these factors significantly impact human visual perception. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently displayed very promising performance in underwater super-resolution (SR). However, the nature of CNN-based methods is local operations, making it difficult to reconstruct rich features. To solve these problems, we present an efficient and lightweight dual-aware integrated network (DAIN) comprising a series of dual-aware enhancement modules (DAEMs) for underwater SR tasks. In particular, DAEMs primarily consist of a multi-scale color correction block (MCCB) and a swin transformer layer (STL). These components work together to incorporate both local and global features, thereby enhancing the quality of image reconstruction. MCCBs can use multiple channels to process the different colors of underwater images to restore the uneven underwater light decay-affected real color and details of the images. The STL captures long-range dependencies and global contextual information, enabling the extraction of neglected features in underwater images. Experimental results demonstrate significant enhancements with a DAIN over conventional SR methods.