OceanXL is a new framework that applies 3D Gaussian Splatting to large-scale underwater scenes by partitioning them into spatially coherent blocks and using adaptive pruning to remove redundant primitives. This divide‑and‑conquer approach improves training efficiency and rendering performance while maintaining global geometric consistency. The authors also release a large underwater dataset and demonstrate that OceanXL achieves favorable scalability, compactness, and efficiency compared to existing baselines, with competitive quality on smaller datasets and smaller model sizes than other underwater methods.
By Haoran Wang, Shaoyu Cai, Adrian Azzarelli, Zhuodong Jiang, Guoxi Huang, Eng Tat Khoo, Brett Seymour, Fan Zhang, David Bull, Nantheera Anantrasirichai
arXiv:2608.23173v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Computer vision applications for 3D scene understanding in underwater environments remain challenging due to the lack of high-quality 3D data and the i...
By Joaqu\'in Figueira, Camile Lendering, Manfred Gonzalez-Hernandez, Giacomo D'Amicantonio, Erkut Akdag, Egor Bondarev
arXiv:2506. 22174v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The transport industry has recently shown significant interest in unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), specifically for port and inland waterway transport.
By Bavo Lesy, Siemen Herremans, Robin Kerstens, Jan Steckel, Walter Daems, Siegfried Mercelis, Ali Anwar
Estimating 3D geometry in underwater environments presents unique challenges due to light attenuation, scattering, and the absence of large-scale, high-quality 3D annotations. Pioneering methods rely on massive dense annotations that are impractical in underwater settings.
PoseDreamer is a new pipeline that uses diffusion models to generate large‑scale synthetic datasets for 3D human mesh estimation, providing 3D mesh annotations that remain aligned with the generated images. The system incorporates controllable image generation, Direct Preference Optimization for control alignment, curriculum‑based hard sample mining, and multi‑stage quality filtering to produce over 500,000 high‑quality samples with a 76% improvement in image‑quality metrics over traditional rendering‑based datasets. Models trained on PoseDreamer match or surpass those trained on real‑world or conventional synthetic data, and combining PoseDreamer with synthetic datasets yields better performance than mixing real and synthetic data alone.
By Lorenza Prospero, Orest Kupyn, Ostap Viniavskyi, Jo\~ao F. Henriques, Christian Rupprecht
This paper presents $π$-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.
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).
By Namritha Lasyapriya Maddali, Rajini Makam, Suresh Sundaram, Narasimhan Sundararajan
Reconstructing photorealistic scenes in unconstrained underwater environments remains challenging due to severe media-induced light scattering and unpredictable dynamic objects. Recent feed-forward vi...
OceanGym is the first comprehensive benchmark for underwater embodied agents, featuring eight realistic task domains and a unified agent framework powered by Multi‑modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). It challenges agents to process optical and sonar data, navigate complex environments, and achieve long‑horizon goals amid low visibility and dynamic currents. Experiments show significant performance gaps between current MLLM agents and human experts, underscoring the difficulty of perception, planning, and adaptability in ocean settings.
By Yida Xue, Mingjun Mao, Xiangyuan Ru, Yuqi Zhu, Baochang Ren, Shuofei Qiao, Mengru Wang, Shumin Deng, Xinyu An, Ningyu Zhang, Ying Chen, Huajun Chen
arXiv:2609.38476v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Synthetic data are most valuable where general-purpose datasets cannot provide the domain-specific priors a task requires, and where manual annotation...
By Saptarshi Neil Sinha, Paul Julius K\"uhn, Michael Weinmann
WaterClear-GS introduces a physics-informed Gaussian splatting method tailored for underwater 3D reconstruction and appearance restoration. It models underwater degradation as intrinsic Gaussian attributes and employs a dual-branch optimization that separates clean appearance from degradation while preserving photometric consistency. The approach incorporates depth-guided geometry regularization, perception-driven supervision, exposure constraints, adaptive regularization, and spectral regularization, achieving strong novel view synthesis and image restoration performance at over 160 FPS.
By Xinrui Zhang, Yufeng Wang, Zesheng Wang, Dacheng Qi, Wenrui Ding, Shuangkang Fang
Reliable feedforward underwater 3D reconstruction remains challenging due to severe light attenuation and backscattering, which degrade visual quality and disrupt feature consistency across views, leading to inaccurate multi-view geometry. To address this issue, we propose WAT3R, a feed-forward framework for reconstructing 3D scenes directly from underwater images.