SDUIE: Semi-Supervised Diffusion for Underwater Image Enhancement with Quant-Text Dual Control

Underwater images often exhibit dominant blue-green hues due to wavelength-dependent light attenuation. While existing enhancement methods have achieved promising performance, they typically overlook the subjective nature of visual preferences. To address this gap, we propose SDUIE, a level-aware Semi-supervised Diffusion framework for Underwater Image Enhancement that enables dual control through both quantitative and textual inputs. SDUIE-Quant allows continuous, numerical adjustment of enhancement levels via low-rank adaptation weight merging within a dual-branch diffusion model. This model comprises a supervised branch trained on synthetic underwater-terrestrial pairs and a self-supervised branch designed to preserve the natural hues of real-world underwater scenes. Building on this, SDUIE-Text introduces intuitive, language-guided control by aligning semantic prompts with visual enhancement effects, leveraging the learned fusion weights. This dual-modality design offers both precise control and flexible, user-preferred enhancement. Experimental results demonstrate that SDUIE achieves state-of-the-art results while better preserving the aesthetic qualities often missed by conventional methods. The source code will be made publicly available.