Zhihao Chen

Zhihao Chen, Yiyuan Ge

Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) techniques aim to address the problem of underwater image degradation due to light absorption and scattering. In recent years, both Convolution Neural Network (CNN)-based and Transformer-based methods have been widely explored. In addition, combining CNN and Transformer can effectively combine global and local information for enhancement. However, this approach is still affected by the secondary complexity of the Transformer and cannot maximize the performance. Recently, the state-space model (SSM) based architecture Mamba has been proposed, which excels in modeling long distances while maintaining linear complexity. This paper explores the potential of this SSM-based model for UIE from both efficiency and effectiveness perspectives. However, the performance of directly applying Mamba is poor because local fine-grained features, which are crucial for image enhancement, cannot be fully utilized. Specifically, we customize the MambaUIE architecture for efficient UIE. Specifically, we introduce visual state space (VSS) blocks to capture global contextual information at the macro level while mining local information at the micro level. Also, for these two kinds of information, we propose a Dynamic Interaction Block (DIB) and Spatial feed-forward Network (SGFN) for intra-block feature aggregation. MambaUIE is able to efficiently synthesize global and local information and maintains a very small number of parameters with high accuracy. Experiments on UIEB datasets show that our method reduces GFLOPs by 67.4% (2.715G) relative to the SOTA method. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first UIE model constructed based on SSM that breaks the limitation of FLOPs on accuracy in UIE. The official repository of MambaUIE at https://github.com/1024AILab/MambaUIE.

Zhihao Chen, Tao Chen, Chenhui Wang et al.

Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) reduces radiation exposure but often degrades image quality, potentially compromising diagnostic accuracy. Existing deep learning-based denoising methods focus primarily on pixel-level mappings, overlooking the potential benefits of high-level semantic guidance. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) suggest that language can serve as a powerful tool for capturing structured semantic information, offering new opportunities to improve LDCT reconstruction. In this paper, we introduce LangMamba, a Language-driven Mamba framework for LDCT denoising that leverages VLM-derived representations to enhance supervision from normal-dose CT (NDCT). LangMamba follows a two-stage learning strategy. First, we pre-train a Language-guided AutoEncoder (LangAE) that leverages frozen VLMs to map NDCT images into a semantic space enriched with anatomical information. Second, we synergize LangAE with two key components to guide LDCT denoising: Semantic-Enhanced Efficient Denoiser (SEED), which enhances NDCT-relevant local semantic while capturing global features with efficient Mamba mechanism, and Language-engaged Dual-space Alignment (LangDA) Loss, which ensures that denoised images align with NDCT in both perceptual and semantic spaces. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that LangMamba outperforms conventional state-of-the-art methods, significantly improving detail preservation and visual fidelity. Remarkably, LangAE exhibits strong generalizability to unseen datasets, thereby reducing training costs. Furthermore, LangDA loss improves explainability by integrating language-guided insights into image reconstruction and offers a plug-and-play fashion. Our findings shed new light on the potential of language as a supervisory signal to advance LDCT denoising. The code is publicly available on https://github.com/hao1635/LangMamba.