# WaterHE-NeRF: Water-ray Tracing Neural Radiance Fields for Underwater Scene Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06946 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06946/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [RAFT: Recurrent All-Pairs Field Transforms for Optical Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.12039/) (2020)
- [Mip-NeRF 360: Unbounded Anti-Aliased Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12077/) (2021)
- [Mip-NeRF: A Multiscale Representation for Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13415/) (2021)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [TensoRF: Tensorial Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09517/) (2022)
- [Local Light Field Fusion: Practical View Synthesis with Prescriptive Sampling Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00889/) (2019)
- [NeRF in the Dark: High Dynamic Range View Synthesis from Noisy Raw Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13679/) (2021)
- [An Underwater Image Enhancement Benchmark Dataset and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05495/) (2019)
- [Fast Underwater Image Enhancement for Improved Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09766/) (2019)
- [Tri-MipRF: Tri-Mip Representation for Efficient Anti-Aliasing Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11335/) (2023)
- [Underwater Image Enhancement via Medium Transmission-Guided Multi-Color Space Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13015/) (2021)
- [F2-NeRF: Fast Neural Radiance Field Training with Free Camera Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15951/) (2023)
- [WaterGAN: Unsupervised Generative Network to Enable Real-time Color Correction of Monocular Underwater Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.07392/) (2017)
- [Optimal Transport Tools (OTT): A JAX Toolbox for all things Wasserstein](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12324/) (2022)
- [SeaThru-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields in Scattering Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07743/) (2023)
- [NAN: Noise-Aware NeRFs for Burst-Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04668/) (2022)
- [WaterNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Underwater Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13091/) (2022)
- [Five A+ Network: You Only Need 9K Parameters for Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08824/) (2023)
- [Beyond NeRF Underwater: Learning Neural Reflectance Fields for True Color Correction of Marine Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03384/) (2023)
- [PyNeRF: Pyramidal Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00252/) (2023)
- [Aleth-NeRF: Low-light Condition View Synthesis with Concealing Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05807/) (2023)

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

- [A Comprehensive Survey on Underwater Image Enhancement Based on Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19684/) (2024)
- [Gaussian Splashing: Direct Volumetric Rendering Underwater](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19588/) (2024)
- [WAT3R: Feedforward Underwater 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21023/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) technology demonstrates immense potential in novel viewpoint synthesis tasks, due to its physics-based volumetric rendering process, which is particularly promising in underwater scenes. Addressing the limitations of existing underwater NeRF methods in handling light attenuation caused by the water medium and the lack of real Ground Truth (GT) supervision, this study proposes WaterHE-NeRF. We develop a new water-ray tracing field by Retinex theory that precisely encodes color, density, and illuminance attenuation in three-dimensional space. WaterHE-NeRF, through its illuminance attenuation mechanism, generates both degraded and clear multi-view images and optimizes image restoration by combining reconstruction loss with Wasserstein distance. Additionally, the use of histogram equalization (HE) as pseudo-GT enhances the network's accuracy in preserving original details and color distribution. Extensive experiments on real underwater datasets and synthetic datasets validate the effectiveness of WaterHE-NeRF. Our code will be made publicly available.