River-GEM: Generating and Enhancing Muddy Water Images

Underwater image enhancement is crucial for marine engineering and aquatic robotics. However, most recent methods have focused on ocean environments, where they trained and tested on oceanic images. As a result, these methods are less effective in river water, where relatively blurry images are produced due to extensive muddy environments. In river water-based image restoration, we have observed two main limitations: (1) the lack of datasets that accurately represent the muddy water conditions found in river environments and (2) the limited effectiveness of current enhancement models in dealing with the unique challenges of muddy water images. To address these limitations, we introduce the "River-GEM" framework, which includes (1) a dataset of highly degraded muddy water images generated using a principle component analysis-based fusion technique and (2) a novel enhancement model utilizing the depth-map guidance to learn complex contextual details of muddy water images. The proposed model captures the intricate details of the objects in degraded images by analyzing feature correlation at multiple scales. Our model shows improvements of 3.42% in SSIM and 5.04% in PSNR over existing methods on the muddy-UIEB dataset. This dataset and enhancement network marks a significant step forward in this area of research. The dataset and code will be available at: https://github.com/Alik033/River-GEM.