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).
The paper introduces an extension to the OceanSim underwater perception simulator, adding a Synthetic Data Generation pipeline that produces large, automatically labeled, photorealistic datasets with configurable scene and sensor settings. The authors evaluate this pipeline on a real-world sea urchin detection task, examining how different synthetic scene variations influence sim-to-real performance. They discuss the pipeline’s findings, limitations, and future directions for improving rendering fidelity, scene diversity, and sim-to-real generalization.
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.
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...
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.
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.
arXiv:2604.00313v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Underwater image classification is constrained by the cost of annotation and by the computational and methodological requirements of task-specific...
arXiv:2609.37565v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep learning surrogates can produce high-resolution coastal flood maps orders of magnitude faster than physics-based hydrodynamic simulators, yet tran...
OceanDepths is the first open, global, AI‑ready dataset that pairs satellite‑derived sea surface temperature, salinity, and height with co‑located EN4 subsurface temperature and salinity profiles, complemented by GLORYS12 reanalysis data. It covers 2000–2024 at 0.1°×0.1° spatial resolution and weekly temporal resolution, providing over 9.5 million paired profiles interpolated to 50 depth levels. The dataset’s 4‑D multivariate structure, high resolution, long temporal extent, and extreme sparsity of subsurface observations make it a challenging testbed for novel AI methods, with demonstrated use in subsurface state reconstruction and potential for observation‑based forecasting.
arXiv:2606. 02610v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ocean general circulation models (OGCMs) are essential to climate science but computationally expensive, limiting ensemble size and forcing scenarios.
arXiv:2606. 13302v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wave parameters in the nearshore are crucial for coastal engineering, shoreline protection, marine hazard assessment, and coastal management for climate resilience.