Underwater images suffer from severe degradation caused by light attenuation and noise interference. Existing methods struggle to achieve a balance between performance and inference efficiency. To address this problem, we propose a Diffusion-Empowered Efficient Restoration (DEER) framework, comprising an enhancement network and a restoration network. The former incorporates two key modules: the High-Frequency Detail Enhancement (HFDE) module introduces a min-pooling channel to recover dark details suppressed by medium absorption, complementing max-pooling and average-pooling to capture comprehensive physical edge characteristics; meanwhile, the Multi-Scale Fusion (MSF) module utilizes multi-scale analysis to address the spatial non-uniformity of color casts. Collectively, they provide rich frequency-domain priors for the subsequent restoration. Regarding the latter, unlike previous approaches that directly utilized a diffusion model for generation, we employ it as a diffusion-guided learned prior. By providing dynamic gradient guidance during the training phase, the lightweight network learns the natural image manifold while avoiding smoothing artifacts induced by pixel-wise mimicry. During inference, the diffusion model is discarded, allowing the lightweight restoration model to achieve accelerated inference. Experimental results demonstrate that DEER outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieves improvement of 0.7% ∼ 5.6% across nearly all metrics on the LSUI and UIEB datasets. Our code is available at here.
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