Unveiling of How Image Restoration Contributes to Underwater Object Detection

Most underwater image restoration works indicate that restoring images can improve their visual quality and performance of computer vision tasks that use the restored data. This paper aims to investigate how image restoration contributes to underwater object detection. We found that utilizing image restoration through data augmentation rather than using it as a pre-processing step can boost underwater object detection accuracy (up to a 1.9% gain in mAP) on URPC2019 dataset.