🚀 News

• Sep. 2025, 🔥Our work “INSPIRATION: A reinforcement learning-based human visual perception-driven image enhancement paradigm for underwater scenes” (Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence) has been newly selected as ESI Hot Paper!
• Sep. 2025, 🎉Our works “WaterCycleDiffusion: Visual-textual Fusion Empowered Underwater Image Enhancement” (accepted by Information Fusion), “Underwater Scene Clarity Reconstruction via Multilayer Information Fusion and Self-Organized Stitching” (accepted by IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology), and “A Comb Concatenation Diffusion Model for Hyperspectral Image Super-resolution” (accepted by Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence) have been accepted for publication!
• Aug. 2025, 👨‍💼I have been appointed as Leading Guest Editor of the Special Issue “Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT)” in the international journal IoT！ Call for papers is now open.
• Jul. 2025, 👨‍💼I have been appointed as Associate Editor of the international journal Frontiers in Imaging！
• Jul. 2025, 🏆Our works “Large Foundation Model Empowered Discriminative Underwater Image Enhancement” (IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing) and “Underwater image captioning: Challenges, models, and datasets” (ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing) has been newly selected as ESI Highly Cited Paper!
• Jul. 2025, 🎉Our work “Underwater Image Captioning with AquaSketch-Enhanced Cross-Scale Information Fusion” has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing!
• May 2025, 🔥Our works “Large Foundation Model Empowered Discriminative Underwater Image Enhancement” (IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing), “Underwater image captioning: Challenges, models, and datasets” (ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing), and “A Reinforcement Learning Paradigm of Configuring Visual Enhancement for Object Detection in Underwater Scenes” (IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering) have been newly selected as ESI Hot Paper!
• Apr. 2025, 🎉Our work “MambaHSISR: Mamba Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution” has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing!
• Apr. 2025, 🎖️I have been selected by the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering editorial board to be the Journal’s Outstanding Reviewer of 2024!
• Mar. 2025, 🔥Our work “Self-organized underwater image enhancement” (ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing) has been newly selected as ESI Hot Paper!
• Feb. 2025, ✨Our work “Underwater image captioning: Challenges, models, and datasets” has been selected as the Feature Article of ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing in February 2025 (the only article selected that month)!
• Jan. 2025, 🎉Our works “Large Foundation Model Empowered Discriminative Underwater Image Enhancement” (accepted by IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing) and “Underwater image captioning: Challenges, models, and datasets” (accepted by ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing) have been accepted for publication!
• Jan. 2025, 🔥Our work “Metalantis: A Comprehensive Underwater Image Enhancement Framework” (IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing) has been newly selected as ESI Hot Paper!
• Jan. 2025, 🏆Our works “Metalantis: A Comprehensive Underwater Image Enhancement Framework” (IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing), “Self-organized underwater image enhancement” (ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing), “INSPIRATION: A reinforcement learning-based human visual perception-driven image enhancement paradigm for underwater scenes” (Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence), and “A Reinforcement Learning Paradigm of Configuring Visual Enhancement for Object Detection in Underwater Scenes” (IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering) have been newly selected as ESI Highly Cited Paper!

📝 Publications

• Hao Wang, Weibo Zhang, Yinghao Xu, Huanyu Li, and Peng Ren. WaterCycleDiffusion: Visual-textual Fusion Empowered Underwater Image Enhancement. Information Fusion, 2025. [PDF]
• Hao Wang, Kevin Köser, and Peng Ren. Large Foundation Model Empowered Discriminative Underwater Image Enhancement. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 2025. [ESI Hot Paper & ESI Highly Cited Paper & TGRS Popular Articles] [PDF]
• Hao Wang, Weibo Zhang, Lu Bai, and Peng Ren. Metalantis: A Comprehensive Underwater Image Enhancement Framework. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 2024. [ESI Hot Paper & ESI Highly Cited Paper & TGRS Popular Articles] [PDF]
• Hao Wang, Weibo Zhang, and Peng Ren. Self-organized underwater image enhancement. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 2024. [ESI Hot Paper & ESI Highly Cited Paper] [PDF]
• Hao Wang, Shixin Sun, and Peng Ren. Underwater Color Disparities: Cues for Enhancing Underwater Images Toward Natural Color Consistencies. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 2024. [ESI Highly Cited Paper] [PDF]
• Hao Wang, Shixin Sun, Laibin Chang, Huanyu Li, Wenwen Zhang, Alejandro C. Frery, and Peng Ren. INSPIRATION: A reinforcement learning-based human visual perception-driven image enhancement paradigm for underwater scenes. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 2024. [ESI Hot Paper & ESI Highly Cited Paper] [PDF]
• Hao Wang, Shixin Sun, and Peng Ren. Meta underwater camera: A smart protocol for underwater image enhancement. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 2023. [ESI Highly Cited Paper] [PDF]
• Hao Wang, Shixin Sun, Xiao Bai, Jian Wang, and Peng Ren. A Reinforcement Learning Paradigm of Configuring Visual Enhancement for Object Detection in Underwater Scenes. IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, 2023. [ESI Hot Paper & ESI Highly Cited Paper & JOE Popular Articles] [PDF]
• Hao Wang, Alejandro C. Frery, Mingjie Li, and Peng Ren. Underwater image enhancement via histogram similarity-oriented color compensation complemented by multiple attribute adjustment. Intelligent Marine Technology and Systems, 2023. [PDF]
• Hao Wang, Shixin Sun, Xiaohui Wu, Li Li, Hao Zhang, Mingjie Li, and Peng Ren. A YOLOv5 Baseline for Underwater Object Detection. OCEANS 2021: San Diego – Porto, 2021. [OCEANS Popular Articles] [PDF]
• Weibo Zhang, Hao Wang, Peng Ren, and Weidong Zhang. Underwater Scene Clarity Reconstruction via Multilayer Information Fusion and Self-Organized Stitching. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 2025. [PDF]
• Yinghao Xu, Hao Wang, Xin Sun, Qianlong Xie, Wenwen Zhang, Peng Ren, Fei Zhou, and Susanto Rahardja. A Comb Concatenation Diffusion Model for Hyperspectral Image Super-resolution. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 2025. [PDF]
• Huanyu Li, Hao Wang, Ying Zhang, Li Li, and Peng Ren. Underwater image captioning: Challenges, models, and datasets. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 2025. [ESI Hot Paper & ESI Highly Cited Paper & ISPRS Featured Articles] [PDF]
• Yinghao Xu, Hao Wang, Fei Zhou, Chunbo Luo, Xin Sun, Susanto Rahardja, and Peng Ren. MambaHSISR: Mamba Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 2025. [PDF]
• Weibo Zhang, Hao Wang, Peng Ren, and Weidong Zhang. MACT: Underwater image color correction via Minimally Attenuated Channel Transfer. Pattern Recognition Letters, 2025. [PDF]
• Huanyu Li, Li Li, Hao Wang, Weibo Zhang, and Peng Ren. Underwater Image Captioning with AquaSketch-Enhanced Cross-Scale Information Fusion. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 2025. [PDF]
• Ying Zhang, Huanyu Li, Bingyu Li, Li Li, Weibo Zhang, Hao Wang, and Peng Ren. An underwater acoustic semantic communication approach to underwater image transmission. Intelligent Marine Technology and Systems, 2025. [PDF]
• Shixin Sun, Hao Wang, Hao Zhang, Mingjie Li, Ming Xiang, Cai Luo, and Peng Ren. Underwater Image Enhancement With Reinforcement Learning. IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, 2024. [JOE Popular Articles] [PDF]
• Weibo Zhang, Hao Wang, Peng Ren, and Weidong Zhang. Underwater Image Color Correction via Color Channel Transfer. IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters, 2024. [PDF]
• Huajun Song, Laibin Chang, Hao Wang, and Peng Ren. Dual-model: Revised imaging network and visual perception correction for underwater image enhancement. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 2023. [PDF]
• Shixin Sun, Hao Wang, Xiaohui Wu, Li Li, Hao Zhang, Mingjie Li, and Peng Ren. Underwater Color Correction via Deep Reinforcement Learning. OCEANS 2021: San Diego – Porto, 2021. [OCEANS Popular Articles] [PDF]

📚 Educations

• 2020 - 2025, PhD in Control Science and Engineering, China University of Petroleum (East China), China. (PhD Thesis: Underwater Optical Observation Enhancement With Reinforcement Learning)
• 2024 - 2025, Visiting PhD, GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel and Kiel University, Germany.
  
• 2017 - 2020, MEng in Control Engineering, Qingdao University of Technology, China.
• 2013 - 2017, BEng in Automation, Qingdao University of Technology, China.

🌍 Academic Services

👨‍💼 Editorial Roles

• 2025 – Present, Associate Editor, Frontiers in Imaging.
• 2025 – Present, Leading Guest Editor, Special Issue “Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT)”, IoT.
• 2025 – Present, Handling Editor, Frontiers in Plant Science.

📝 Peer Review Experience (Reviewed over 300 manuscripts for more than 50 academic journals)

🔄Continuous Reviewer (2023 – Present) for:

• Information Fusion
• IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
• IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
• IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
• IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence
• Pattern Recognition
• Knowledge-Based Systems
• Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence
• Neural Networks
• Artificial Intelligence Review
• Optics and Laser Technology
• Infrared Physics and Technology
• Applied Ocean Research
• IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering
• IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing
• …and more.

🎖 Selected Honors and Awards

• Apr. 2025, 🎖️IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering’s Outstanding Reviewers.