PGN: Progressively Guided Network with Pixel-Wise Attention for Underwater Image Enhancement

Light scattering and attenuation in water degrade underwater images with low visibility and color distortion, which often interfere with the high-level visual tasks of underwater autonomous robots. Most existing deep learning methods for underwater image enhancement only supervise the final output of network and ignore the promotion effect of the intermediate results on the final feature representation. These supervision methods affect the feature representation ability, network efficiency, and ability. In this paper, we present a novel idea of multiple-stage supervision to guide the network to learn useful features correctly and progressively. With this idea, we propose a pixel-wise Progressive Guided Network (PGN) for underwater image enhancement to take advantage of the network’s intermediate results and promote the final enhancement effect. The Pixel-Wise Attention Module is designed by introducing supervision in each stage to progressively promote the representation ability of the features and the recovered image quality. The experimental results on several datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms recent state-of-the-art underwater image enhancement methods.