UWMamba: UnderWater Image Enhancement With State Space Model

Recently, state space models (SSM) with efficient design, i.e., Mamba, have shown great potential in modeling long-range dependencies with linear complexity. However, the pure SSM-based model yields sub-optimal underwater enhancement performance due to insufficient local details. Given the superiority of convolution in local perception, we propose a hybrid network, named UWMamba, which combines SSM and convolution for underwater image enhancement. We introduce a conv mamba layer (CML) as the foundation layer to combine the visual state space block (VSSB) with convolution. The convolution is used to capture local detailed features, while the VSSB is employed to capture long-range global features, which complement each other. Furthermore, considering underwater images suffer from severe and uneven degradation of spatial regions and color channels, we propose a Mamba Attention Fusion Module (MAFM), which fuses VSSB with an attention mechanism for better perception of channels and spatial regions. Extensive experiments on real-world underwater image datasets demonstrate the promising performance of our method in both objective metrics and subjective comparisons.