Wavelet-based Fourier Information Interaction with Frequency Diffusion Adjustment for Underwater Image Restoration

Chen Zhao, Weiling Cai, Chenyu Dong, Chengwei Hu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 8281-8291

Underwater images are subject to intricate and diverse degradation inevitably affecting the effectiveness of underwater visual tasks. However most approaches primarily operate in the raw pixel space of images which limits the exploration of the frequency characteristics of underwater images leading to an inadequate utilization of deep models' representational capabilities in producing high-quality images. In this paper we introduce a novel Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) framework named WF-Diff designed to fully leverage the characteristics of frequency domain information and diffusion models. WF-Diff consists of two detachable networks: Wavelet-based Fourier information interaction network (WFI2-net) and Frequency Residual Diffusion Adjustment Module (FRDAM). With our full exploration of the frequency domain information WFI2-net aims to achieve preliminary enhancement of frequency information in the wavelet space. Our proposed FRDAM can further refine the high- and low-frequency information of the initial enhanced images which can be viewed as a plug-and-play universal module to adjust the detail of the underwater images. With the above techniques our algorithm can show SOTA performance on real-world underwater image datasets and achieves competitive performance in visual quality.