English

A Comprehensive Survey on Underwater Image Enhancement Based on Deep Learning

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-02-26 v4

Abstract

Underwater image enhancement (UIE) presents a significant challenge within computer vision research. Despite the development of numerous UIE algorithms, a thorough and systematic review is still absent. To foster future advancements, we provide a detailed overview of the UIE task from several perspectives. Firstly, we introduce the physical models, data construction processes, evaluation metrics, and loss functions. Secondly, we categorize and discuss recent algorithms based on their contributions, considering six aspects: network architecture, learning strategy, learning stage, auxiliary tasks, domain perspective, and disentanglement fusion. Thirdly, due to the varying experimental setups in the existing literature, a comprehensive and unbiased comparison is currently unavailable. To address this, we perform both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of state-of-the-art algorithms across multiple benchmark datasets. Lastly, we identify key areas for future research in UIE. A collection of resources for UIE can be found at {https://github.com/YuZhao1999/UIE}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.19684,
  title  = {A Comprehensive Survey on Underwater Image Enhancement Based on Deep Learning},
  author = {Xiaofeng Cong and Yu Zhao and Jie Gui and Junming Hou and Dacheng Tao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.19684},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

This article has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence

R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:46:37.730Z