Self-Supervised Enhancement of Forward-Looking Sonar Images: Bridging Cross-Modal Degradation Gaps through Feature Space Transformation and Multi-Frame Fusion

Abstract: Enhancing forward-looking sonar images is critical for accurate underwater target detection. Current deep learning methods mainly rely on supervised training with simulated data, but the difficulty in obtaining high-quality real-world paired data limits their practical use and generalization. Although self-supervised approaches from remote sensing partially alleviate data shortages, they neglect the cross-modal degradation gap between sonar and remote sensing images. Directly transferring pretrained weights often leads to overly smooth sonar images, detail loss, and insufficient brightness. To address this, we propose a feature-space transformation that maps sonar images from the pixel domain to a robust feature domain, effectively bridging the degradation gap. Additionally, our self-supervised multi-frame fusion strategy leverages complementary inter-frame information to naturally remove speckle noise and enhance target-region brightness. Experiments on three self-collected real-world forward-looking sonar datasets show that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches, effectively suppressing noise, preserving detailed edges, and substantially improving brightness, demonstrating strong potential for underwater target detection applications.