TIDE-Net: A Triple-Branch Illumination and Detail Enhancement Network for Underwater Images

Underwater images exhibit severe colour distortion, low contrast, and blurred details due to light absorption and scattering, which limits their practical use in marine applications. Existing methods face poor generalisation, high computational costs and weak integration of physical priors. To address these issues, this paper proposes TIDE-Net, a triple-branch illumination and detail enhancement network for underwater images. It decomposed inputs into illumination, reflectance intensity, and chromaticity branches for parallel optimisation, enabling decoupled handling of brightness, texture, and colour degradation. A piecewise colour correction module mitigated complex colour casts without introducing artefacts; a lightweight U-Net branch enhanced fine details while suppressing noise; and a local gain compensation module improved brightness uniformity and reduced halo effects. Experiments on four datasets showed that TIDE-Net outperforms some state-of-the-art methods, achieving a PSNR of 29.44 dB, an SSIM of 0.94, and competitive UIQM/UCIQE scores with only 7.74 M parameters. The results confirmed that the proposed triple-branch strategy effectively balances physical interpretability, restoration quality, and computational efficiency. In conclusion, TIDE-Net provides a robust and lightweight solution suitable for deployment on resource-limited underwater platforms, offering practical value for real-world underwater vision tasks.