MCS‐UGAN: Multiple Colour Space Underwater GAN for Underwater Image Enhancement

ABSTRACT Images captured by underwater robots often suffer from issues such as blurring and colour distortion, which hinder effective feature extraction and target recognition in underwater environments. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel underwater image enhancement method based on generative adversarial networks (GANs), termed multiple colour space underwater generative adversarial network (MCS‐UGAN). The proposed method is built upon a GAN framework, consisting of a generator and a discriminator. The generator comprises two main modules: a deblurring module and a colour correction module. The deblurring module innovatively incorporates an efficient multi‐scale feature extraction technique and an attention mechanism, which enhances object contours while preserving fine image details. The colour correction module integrates residual blocks into the U‐Net architecture, effectively mitigating the problems of gradient vanishing and explosion during backpropagation in underwater image enhancement networks, thereby enhancing the network's feature learning capability. This design corrects colour distortions while preserving edge information in the image. The discriminator adopts the PatchGAN structure, which focuses on the local regions of the image, significantly improving the generator's ability to restore high‐frequency details and thus enhancing the quality of the generated images. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that, compared to existing methods, MCS‐UGAN achieves superior performance in terms of peak signal‐to‐noise ratio, structural similarity index measure, underwater image quality measure, and underwater colour image quality evaluation, with average values of 26.24, 0.91, 3.13, and 0.64, respectively. Results from real‐world applications further show that MCS‐UGAN effectively increases the number of extracted corner points, validating its practicality and effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/invincibility6/MCS‐UGAN.git