Degradation-Aware Multi-Stage Fusion for Underwater Image Enhancement
Lian Xie, Hao Chen, Jin Shu · Journal of Imaging · 2026
Underwater images frequently suffer from color casts, low illumination, and blur due to wavelength-dependent absorption and scattering. We present a practical two-stage, modular, and degradation-aware framework designed for real-time enhancement, prioritizing deployability on edge devices. Stage I employs a lightweight CNN to classify inputs into three dominant degradation classes (color cast, low light, blur) with 91.85% accuracy on an EUVP subset. Stage II applies three scene-specific lightweight enhancement pipelines and fuses their outputs using two alternative learnable modules: a global Linear Fusion and a LiteUNetFusion (spatially adaptive weighting with optional residual correction). Compared to the three single-scene optimizers (average PSNR = 19.0 dB; mean UCIQE ≈ 0.597; mean UIQM ≈ 2.07), the Linear Fusion improves PSNR by +2.6 dB on average and yields roughly +20.7% in UCIQE and +21.0% in UIQM, while maintaining low latency (~90 ms per 640 × 480 frame on an Intel i5-13400F (Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA, USA). The LiteUNetFusion further refines results: it raises PSNR by +1.5 dB over the Linear model (23.1 vs. 21.6 dB), brings modest perceptual gains (UCIQE from 0.72 to 0.74, UIQM 2.5 to 2.8) at a runtime of ≈125 ms per 640 × 480 frame, and better preserves local texture and color consistency in mixed-degradation scenes. We release implementation details for reproducibility and discuss limitations (e.g., occasional blur/noise amplification and domain generalization) together with future directions.