Junming Hou

Xiaofeng Cong, Jing Zhang, Yeying Jin et al.

Underwater images often suffer from quality degradation due to absorption and scattering effects. Most existing underwater image enhancement algorithms produce a single, fixed-color image, limiting user flexibility and application. To address this limitation, we propose a method called \textit{ColorCode}, which enhances underwater images while offering a range of controllable color outputs. Our approach involves recovering an underwater image to a reference enhanced image through supervised training and decomposing it into color and content codes via self-reconstruction and cross-reconstruction. The color code is explicitly constrained to follow a Gaussian distribution, allowing for efficient sampling and interpolation during inference. ColorCode offers three key features: 1) color enhancement, producing an enhanced image with a fixed color; 2) color adaptation, enabling controllable adjustments of long-wavelength color components using guidance images; and 3) color interpolation, allowing for the smooth generation of multiple colors through continuous sampling of the color code. Quantitative and visual evaluations on popular and challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of ColorCode over existing methods in providing diverse, controllable, and color-realistic enhancement results. The source code is available at https://github.com/Xiaofeng-life/ColorCode.

Xiaofeng Cong, Jie Gui, Jing Zhang et al.

Existing research based on deep learning has extensively explored the problem of daytime image dehazing. However, few studies have considered the characteristics of nighttime hazy scenes. There are two distinctions between nighttime and daytime haze. First, there may be multiple active colored light sources with lower illumination intensity in nighttime scenes, which may cause haze, glow and noise with localized, coupled and frequency inconsistent characteristics. Second, due to the domain discrepancy between simulated and real-world data, unrealistic brightness may occur when applying a dehazing model trained on simulated data to real-world data. To address the above two issues, we propose a semi-supervised model for real-world nighttime dehazing. First, the spatial attention and frequency spectrum filtering are implemented as a spatial-frequency domain information interaction module to handle the first issue. Second, a pseudo-label-based retraining strategy and a local window-based brightness loss for semi-supervised training process is designed to suppress haze and glow while achieving realistic brightness. Experiments on public benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its superiority over state-of-the-art methods. The source code and Supplementary Materials are placed in the https://github.com/Xiaofeng-life/SFSNiD.

Xiaofeng Cong, Yu-Xin Zhang, Haoran Wei et al.

While nighttime image dehazing has been extensively studied, converting nighttime hazy images to daytime-equivalent brightness remains largely unaddressed. Existing methods face two critical limitations: (1) datasets overlook the brightness relationship between day and night, resulting in the brightness mapping being inconsistent with the real world during image synthesis; and (2) models do not explicitly incorporate daytime brightness knowledge, limiting their ability to reconstruct realistic lighting. To address these challenges, we introduce the Diffusion-Based Nighttime Dehazing (DiffND) framework, which excels in both data synthesis and lighting reconstruction. Our approach starts with a data synthesis pipeline that simulates severe distortions while enforcing brightness consistency between synthetic and real-world scenes, providing a strong foundation for learning night-to-day brightness mapping. Next, we propose a restoration model that integrates a pre-trained diffusion model guided by a brightness perception network. This design harnesses the diffusion model's generative ability while adapting it to nighttime dehazing through brightness-aware optimization. Experiments validate our dataset's utility and the model's superior performance in joint haze removal and brightness mapping.