A Benchmark dataset for both underwater image enhancement and underwater object detection
This provides a new benchmark for researchers in marine engineering and aquatic robotics to investigate how image enhancement affects detection performance, but it is incremental as it builds on existing datasets by adding missing annotations.
The authors tackled the lack of a dataset for studying the relationship between underwater image enhancement and object detection by creating the OUC dataset, which includes bounding box annotations and high-quality reference images to enable comprehensive analysis.
Underwater image enhancement is such an important vision task due to its significance in marine engineering and aquatic robot. It is usually work as a pre-processing step to improve the performance of high level vision tasks such as underwater object detection. Even though many previous works show the underwater image enhancement algorithms can boost the detection accuracy of the detectors, no work specially focus on investigating the relationship between these two tasks. This is mainly because existing underwater datasets lack either bounding box annotations or high quality reference images, based on which detection accuracy or image quality assessment metrics are calculated. To investigate how the underwater image enhancement methods influence the following underwater object detection tasks, in this paper, we provide a large-scale underwater object detection dataset with both bounding box annotations and high quality reference images, namely OUC dataset. The OUC dataset provides a platform for researchers to comprehensive study the influence of underwater image enhancement algorithms on the underwater object detection task.