arXiv · 2610.39183
Multi-level Constrained Learning for Underwater Image Enhancement
Abstract
Underwater image enhancement aims to correct color and recover detail degraded by wavelength-dependent attenuation, scattering, and noise. Paired-reference supervision constrains output similarity, but does not by itself specify the color mapping, the strength of local detail corrections, or consistency with the degraded observation. We propose MCL-UIE, a paired-supervised framework that addresses these requirements by constraining restoration operations and the training objective. Monotonic Chromatic Transform (MCT) restricts global color mapping in log-LMS space through positive diagonal entries and bounded cross-channel coefficients. Uncertainty-Gated Wavelet Reconstruction (UGWR) modulates high-frequency residuals with a learned confidence gate calibrated against normalized wavelet reconstruction errors. During training, Reference-Anchored Degradation Replay (RADR) renders the enhanced image and its paired reference using shared latent degradation proxies, encouraging both to reproduce the input. The three components share a restoration network that combines structured color correction, locally controlled detail recovery, and reference-anchored replay. MCL-UIE ranks first in thirteen of sixteen full-reference dataset-metric comparisons and produces competitive visual results on no-reference benchmarks. Objective ablations indicate that confidence calibration is most effective when combined with replay supervision. RADR is used only during training and adds no inference-time computation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Wangtao-Bao/MCL-UIE.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Explore connections, maps & timelines
Wangtao Bao, Liping Xie, Kanjian Zhang, Huimin Lu. 2026-10-29. Multi-level Constrained Learning for Underwater Image Enhancement. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39183
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.