Model Releases
pi-SUB: A Physics-Informed Synthetic Underwater Benchmark Dataset for Underwater Image Enhancement
arXiv:2608.10589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents pi-SUB, a physics-informed framework for generating synthetic underwater benchmark datasets that bridges the synthetic-to-real gap
arXiv:2608.10589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents pi-SUB, a physics-informed framework for generating synthetic underwater benchmark datasets that bridges the synthetic-to-real gap for Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE). The proposed framework extends the classical underwater image formation model by incorporating depth-dependent downwelling irradiance, biologically resolved absorption, and environmental scattering across all ten Jerlov water types, together with independently controllable residual phenomena. Using this framework, the pi-SUB dataset consists of paired synthetic underwater-reference images spanning shallow-to-deep and coastal-to-oceanic environments. Extensive simulation studies have been carried out to evaluate pi-SUB along two criteria namely hyper-realism and generalizability. For hyper-realism, pi-SUB attains a global Frechet Inception Distance (FID) that is 46% lower than Syrea. For generalizability, four state-of-the-art UIE architectures (FUnIE-GAN, Pix2Pix, PUIE-Net, and Phaseformer) are used for comparative evaluation of pi-SUB. These models were independently trained on six datasets including one real and five synthetic datasets and tested on six real-world benchmarks datasets. Across four UIE architectures and six real benchmark datasets, pi-SUB improves UIQM by 4.18% over PHISWID (next best) and 9.46% over Syrea (next best), while reducing NIQE by 48.78% and 23.98%, respectively. These results establish pi-SUB as a hyper-realistic and generalizable benchmark for developing the next generation of underwater image enhancement methods. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/airl-iisc/pi-SUB
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Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-08-12