Degradation-Guided Underwater Image Restoration with Task-Oriented Latent Control

2026-08-09

AI Summary

This work addresses the limitation of existing underwater image restoration methods in effectively leveraging the dual role of degradation cues—as both guidance and interference. To this end, we propose the PROTEUS framework, which integrates degradation-guided dynamic feature modulation with a task-oriented latent control mechanism. Our approach enables spatially adaptive feature modulation at the feature level and introduces structured control codes to regulate skip connections at the channel level in the representation space. Notably, the method operates without requiring clean reference embeddings; instead, it learns control codes through discriminative regularization, facilitating multi-stage adaptive restoration. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across five paired and four no-reference benchmarks, achieving an effective balance between restoration quality and computational efficiency.

Abstract

Degradation information in underwater images plays a dual role: its spatial and spectral cues can guide adaptive restoration, while degradation-entangled features may be propagated without explicit regulation during decoding. Existing methods largely overlook this dual role, either underexploiting degradation cues or directly forwarding encoder features through skip connections. To address this issue, we propose PROTEUS, which couples degradation-guided feature adaptation with task?oriented latent control. PROTEUS tackles this problem from two complementary perspectives. At the feature level, the Guided Dynamic Feature Modulation Block exploits spatially varying degradation cues to adapt feature processing across network stages. At the representation level, the task-oriented latent controller learns a structured control code under discriminative regularisation and uses it for channel-wise modulation of skip features, without requiring the code to form a metrically cleaner embedding. Extensive experiments on five paired and four non-reference underwater benchmarks demonstrate that PROTEUS achieves highly competitive restoration performance, with a favourable balance between restoration quality and computational cost.

Problem

• underwater image restoration
• degradation cues
• feature modulation
• skip connections
• latent control

Innovation

• degradation-guided restoration
• latent control
• feature modulation
• underwater image enhancement
• skip connection regulation