# Seafloor-Invariant Caustics Removal from Underwater Imagery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10167 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10167/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [Rethinking Atrous Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.05587/) (2017)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [Beyond RGB: Very High Resolution Urban Remote Sensing With Multimodal Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08681/) (2017)
- [Image-based underwater 3D reconstruction for Cultural Heritage: from image collection to 3D. Critical steps and considerations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.00928/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [RecGS: Removing Water Caustic with Recurrent Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10318/) (2024)
- [WaterMono: Teacher-Guided Anomaly Masking and Enhancement Boosting for Robust Underwater Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13344/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning-based Bathymetry Retrieval without In-situ Depths using Remote Sensing Imagery and SfM-MVS DSMs with Data Gaps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11416/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Mapping the seafloor with underwater imaging cameras is of significant importance for various applications including marine engineering, geology, geomorphology, archaeology and biology. For shallow waters, among the underwater imaging challenges, caustics i.e., the complex physical phenomena resulting from the projection of light rays being refracted by the wavy surface, is likely the most crucial one. Caustics is the main factor during underwater imaging campaigns that massively degrade image quality and affect severely any 2D mosaicking or 3D reconstruction of the seabed. In this work, we propose a novel method for correcting the radiometric effects of caustics on shallow underwater imagery. Contrary to the state-of-the-art, the developed method can handle seabed and riverbed of any anaglyph, correcting the images using real pixel information, thus, improving image matching and 3D reconstruction processes. In particular, the developed method employs deep learning architectures in order to classify image pixels to "non-caustics" and "caustics". Then, exploits the 3D geometry of the scene to achieve a pixel-wise correction, by transferring appropriate color values between the overlapping underwater images. Moreover, to fill the current gap, we have collected, annotated and structured a real-world caustic dataset, namely R-CAUSTIC, which is openly available. Overall, based on the experimental results and validation the developed methodology is quite promising in both detecting caustics and reconstructing their intensity.