DATDM: Dynamic attention transformer diffusion model for underwater image enhancement

Underwater image degradation presents complex challenges, significantly impairing the efficiency of underwater tasks. The mainstream underwater image enhancement (UIE) methods are roughly divided into traditional physics-based and data-driven deep-learning methods. However, physical model-based methods have poor generalization capabilities. Data-driven methods require high-quality training data and suffer from limited model stability. We propose a novel UIE framework, DATDM, to address the above limitations and improve degraded underwater images. We first introduce a color correction module (CCM) to strengthen the model’s image restoration capabilities. On the other hand, we propose a novel dynamic attention transformer (DAT) denoising network with excellent performance. The proposed DAT denoising network utilizes a dynamic attention transformer mechanism that adaptively extracts feature information based on the complexity of the feature map, effectively capturing rich features while optimizing computational efficiency. The proposed DATDM method significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods, with peak signal-to-noise ratios of 24.05 and 27.39 and structural similarity index measures of 0.9233 and 0.9504 on the UIEB and LSUI datasets, respectively. The final experiments demonstrate that our DATDM achieves better performance and visual effects on UIE tasks. • The proposed DATDM combines CCM and DAT denoising network for underwater image enhancement. • The CCM module guides the model’s inverse denoising to restore color and detail information more accurately. • The DAT denoising network introduces a dynamic attention transformer to extract complex feature information adaptively.