MGLF-Net: Underwater Image Enhancement Network Based on Multi-Scale Global and Local Feature Fusion

Underwater imaging is generally subject to complex degradation issues such as color distortion, contrast degradation, and detail blurring due to the selective absorption and scattering of light wavelengths by water. Existing deep learning methods have limitations in the collaborative optimization of local details and global color. To address this issue, this paper proposes a multi-scale enhancement network based on global and local feature fusion. By integrating the advantages of CNN and Transformer, it achieves joint optimization of global color correction and local detail enhancement. Specifically, MGLFNet extracts global and local features of the image through the global and local feature fusion block in the core component of the multi-scale convolution–Transformer block and performs dynamic fusion. Meanwhile, to extract features at different scales to enhance performance, we design a multi-scale convolution feed-forward network. Through the action of the fusion module and the feed-forward network, a color-rich and detail-clear enhanced image is obtained. A large number of experimental results show that MGLF-Net outperforms comparison methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations of visual quality, with PSNR and SSIM values of 25.37 and 0.918 on the UIEB dataset, respectively, as well as low memory usage and computational resource requirements. In addition, detailed ablation experiments prove the effectiveness of the core components of the model.