UniUIR:
Considering Underwater Image Restoration as An All-in-One Learner

Wuhan University1
Guangdong University of Technology2
Horizon Robotics3
Accepted by IEEE TIP 2025
📧 Corresponding Author
MY ALT TEXT

The figures present a subjective statistical analysis of the predominant distortions in the UIEB dataset. Although each image may exhibit multiple distortions, for simplified classification, each is categorized by its most visually prominent distortion.

Abstract

Existing underwater image restoration (UIR) methods generally only handle color distortion or jointly address color and haze issues, but they often overlook the more complex degradations that can occur in underwater scenes. To address this limitation, we propose a Universal Underwater Image Restoration method, termed as UniUIR, considering the complex scenario of real-world underwater mixed distortions as an all-in-one manner. To disentangle degradation-specific effects and capture their inter-correlations, we propose the Mamba Mixture-of-Experts module (MMoEM). Each expert specializes in distinct aspects of degradation, while gating mechanism dynamically routes features to appropriate experts. This design enables collaborative prior extraction and preserves global context, all within linear computational complexity. Building upon this foundation, to enhance degradation representation and address the task conflicts that arise when handling multiple types of degradation, we introduce the spatial-frequency prior generator. This module extracts degradation prior information in both spatial and frequency domains, and adaptively selects the most appropriate task-specific prompts based on image content, thereby improving the accuracy of image restoration. Finally, to more effectively address complex, region-dependent distortions in UIR task, we incorporate depth information derived from a large-scale pre-trained depth prediction model, thereby enabling the network to perceive and leverage depth variations across different image regions to handle localized degradation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniUIR can produce more attractive results across qualitative and quantitative comparisons, and shows strong generalization than state-of-the-art methods.

BibTeX

@article{zhang2025uniuir,
  title={UniUIR: Considering Underwater Image Restoration as An All-in-One Learner},
  author={Zhang, Xu and Zhang, Huan and Wang, Guoli and Zhang, Qian and Zhang, Lefei and Du, Bo},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.12981},
  year={2025}
}