A Generative Data Framework with Reliable Supervision for Underwater Image Restoration and Enhancement

원문 초록

Learning-based underwater image restoration and enhancement rely heavily on high-quality paired training data. However, obtaining clear reference images for real underwater scenes remains challenging. Existing datasets often use the outputs of enhancement algorithms as references, which may introduce uncertainty into supervision targets. To address this issue, we propose a generative data framework that preserves clear source images as restoration references and synthesizes corresponding underwater inputs through unpaired image-to-image translation. Using representative underwater appearances to guide the translation, we construct UWNature from natural photographs. We systematically examine the reliability of the generated supervision through its agreement with real underwater appearances, structural consistency, and depth-related degradation characteristics. Experiments across 6 restoration architectures and 3 test sets evaluate its effectiveness through objective metrics, human perceptual assessment, and the correspondence between synthetic degradation and learned restoration behavior. The results demonstrate competitive restoration performance and favorable perceptual quality on real underwater images. Further analysis reveals that greater spatial plausibility of synthetic degradation does not necessarily improve restoration performance, highlighting the importance of evaluating both the intrinsic properties of synthetic data and their effectiveness for model learning. These findings support a scalable framework for constructing and evaluating reliable paired supervision for underwater image restoration and enhancement. The generated datasets are available at: https://github.com/tianyufengcn/SynUIEDatasets.