FACMamba: Frequency-Aware Coupled State Space Modeling for Underwater Image Enhancement

Recent advances in underwater image enhancement (UIE) have achieved notable progress using deep learning techniques; however, existing methods often struggle with limited receptive fields, inadequate frequency modeling, and poor structural perception, leading to sub-optimal visual quality and weak generalization in complex underwater environments. To tackle these issues, we propose FACMamba, a Mamba-based framework augmented with frequency-aware mechanisms, enabling efficient modeling of long-range spatial relations for underwater image restoration. Specifically, FACMamba incorporates three key components: a Multi-Directional Vision State-Space Module (MVSM) to model directional spatial context via the proposed 8-direction selective scan block (SS8D), a Frequency-Aware Guidance Module (FAGM) for learning informative frequency representations with low overhead, and a Structure-Aware Fusion Module (SAFM) to preserve fine-grained structural cues through adaptive multi-scale integration. Recognizing the importance of spatial-frequency interaction, our model fuses these representations via lightweight architecture to enhance both texture and color fidelity. Experiments on standard UIE benchmarks demonstrate that FACMamba achieves a favorable balance between enhancement quality and computational efficiency, outperforming many existing UIE methods.