UKD-Net: efficient image enhancement with knowledge distillation

Underwater images often suffer from color distortion, blurred details, and low contrast. Therefore, more researchers are exploring underwater image enhancement (UIE) methods. However, UIE models based on deep learning suffer from high computational complexity, thus limiting their integration into underwater devices. In this work, we propose a lightweight UIE network based on knowledge distillation (UKD-Net), which includes a teacher network (T-Net) and a student network (S-Net). T-Net uses our designed multi-scale fusion block and parallel attention block to achieve excellent performance. We utilize knowledge distillation technology to transfer the rich knowledge of the T-Net onto a deployable S-Net. Additionally, S-Net employs blueprint separable convolutions and multistage distillation block to reduce parameter count and computational complexity. Results demonstrate that our UKD-Net successfully achieves a lightweight model design while maintaining superior enhanced performance.