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.
AquaBEV is a monocular underwater occupancy model that predicts local bird’s‑eye‑view (BEV) occupancy from a single RGB image. It uses paired 3D imaging sonar data as geometric supervision during training, mapping visual features into a calibration‑free polar representation and decoding along the range dimension before reconstructing Cartesian BEV coordinates. In a controlled underwater occupancy benchmark, AquaBEV outperforms the strongest transferred baseline with 31.4 % Visible IoU and 38.6 % Observed IoU, achieving 4.0 % and 4.3 % relative improvements respectively.
arXiv:2608. 19710v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable underwater robotic perception remains difficult because optical imagery degrades under turbidity, wavelength-dependent attenuation, low illumination, scattering, and blur.
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.
The paper introduces 3D-USE, a two‑stage framework for underwater scene‑level enhancement that learns a persistent, visibility‑enhanced 3D representation from degraded multi‑view observations. First, the Medium Radial Basis Anchor Representation (MediumRBF) builds a medium‑aware Gaussian scene by separating object and medium effects. Then, Appearance Transition Consensus (ATC) transfers 2D underwater image enhancement knowledge into scene‑global and Gaussian‑local targets, which are realized by an Underwater Bilateral Appearance Field (U‑BAF) to render enhanced novel views without a 2D UIE model at inference. Experiments on real underwater scenes demonstrate improved visibility, cross‑view consistency, and preserved reconstruction quality.
arXiv:2608.22906v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent monocular 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) streaming reconstruction methods have achieved impressive performance by balancing reconstruction quality...
The paper investigates the performance of Gaussian splatting techniques for 3D reconstruction in underwater settings, evaluating five publicly available systems across datasets with varying turbidity, illumination loss, and colour attenuation, as well as an industrial survey. The study finds that reconstruction quality is more influenced by environmental setup—such as water clarity and illumination geometry—than by the specific algorithmic architecture, with clear water yielding high frame registration rates and artificial moving lights favoring medium‑blind splatting. The authors release all scene builds, per‑run configurations, and evaluation code to support reproducibility.
AQUA-Net is a lightweight underwater image enhancement model that fuses spatial, frequency, and illumination information through a residual encoder‑decoder architecture with dual auxiliary branches. The frequency fusion encoder incorporates Fourier‑domain cues to preserve textures and details, while the illumination‑aware decoder applies adaptive exposure correction based on a learned illumination map. Experiments on benchmark datasets and a new high‑resolution Mediterranean Sea video set demonstrate that AQUA-Net achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance with fewer parameters, showing strong generalization and robustness for real‑world underwater imaging.
The paper presents a pipeline for constructing accurate ground‑truth annotations for visual tracking across the air–water interface, synchronizing camera frames with motion‑capture data and correcting underwater projections. It introduces a Cross‑Medium Recovery Policy (CMRP) that uses confidence‑triggered template selection to improve MixFormerV2’s tracking performance without retraining the backbone. CMRP raises Macro Success AUC by 2.95 points and increases tracking coverage while reducing recovery latency.
The underwater environment is challenging for 3D reconstruction, because particles suspended in the water scatter and diffuse light, turbidity varies, absorption depends on wavelength, and illuminatio...
The paper introduces AquaOV255, a large-scale underwater segmentation dataset with 255 categories and over 20,000 images, and establishes the UOVSBench benchmark by combining it with five other datasets. It also presents Earth2Ocean, a training‑free open‑vocabulary segmentation framework that adapts terrestrial vision‑language models to underwater scenes using a Geometric‑guided Visual Mask Generator and a Category‑visual Semantic Alignment module. Experiments on UOVSBench show that Earth2Ocean significantly improves performance while keeping inference efficient.
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.