MUIR: Mamba for Underwater Image Rendering

Underwater image rendering techniques are designed to generate images with a distinct underwater style from arbitrary clean images. These techniques are widely used in underwater image generation, virtual games, and camera filters. Recently, a novel image processing architecture based on the state space model (SSM), named VMamba, has been proposed, which effectively reduces computational complexity to linear while preserving a global receptive field. This paper explores the potential of VMamba for underwater image rendering, focusing on computational efficiency and model performance. To this end, we incorporate the VSS Block, the core module of VMamba, into the underwater image rendering network and propose MUIR. Specifically, we use real underwater images to provide the light field style and clean images to supply the image content with depth information. Additionally, we design the VMUNet architecture, which utilizes the VSS Block for feature fusion after each layer of down sampling. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first underwater image rendering model based on the Mamba architecture. Experiments demonstrate that our method, with a lightweight architecture of 5.06GMac FLOPs and 7.16M Params, achieves visual effects and quantitative metrics comparable to or surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods.

I. Introduction

In recent decades, underwater image rendering technology has demonstrated significant research value across various fields. For instance, in the domain of underwater visual tasks, research on underwater environments has garnered widespread attention due to the increasing demand for activities such as ocean exploration and underwater robotic navigation. However, data collection for the complex and diverse underwater environments poses a major challenge. Manually collecting underwater images is often time-consuming, labor-intensive, and costly. Synthesizing underwater datasets can reduce the cost of data collection, improve efficiency, and make up for the lack of existing data. As another example, in the field of virtual games, the development of virtual game technology requires enriching the game scene, including the underwater scene. Creating realistic underwater scenes can enhance the player's immersion and provide a unique visual experience.