Unformer: A Transformer-Based Approach for Adaptive Multiscale Feature Aggregation in Underwater Image Enhancement

Underwater imaging is often compromised by light scattering and absorption, resulting in image degradation and distortion. This manifests as blurred details, color shifts, and diminished illumination and contrast, thereby hindering advancements in underwater research. To mitigate these issues, we propose Unformer, an innovative underwater image enhancement (UIE) technique that leverages a transformer-based architecture for multiscale adaptive feature aggregation. Our approach employs a multiscale feature fusion strategy that adaptively restores illumination and detail features. We reevaluate the relationship between convolution and transformer to develop a novel encoder structure. This structure effectively integrates both long-range and short-range dependencies, dynamically combines local and global features, and constructs a comprehensive global context. Furthermore, we propose a unique multibranch decoder architecture that enhances and efficiently extracts spatial context information through the transformer module. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms other techniques in both subjective and objective evaluations. Compared with the latest methods, Unformer has improved the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) by 19.5% and 14.8% respectively on the LSUI and EUVP datasets. The code is available at: <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/yhflq/Unformer</uri>.