# Fast Underwater Scene Reconstruction using Multi-View Stereo and Physical Imaging

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.11884 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.11884/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jan 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [NeRF in the Wild: Neural Radiance Fields for Unconstrained Photo Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.02268/) (2020)
- [MVSNet: Depth Inference for Unstructured Multi-view Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02505/) (2018)
- [MVSNeRF: Fast Generalizable Radiance Field Reconstruction from Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15595/) (2021)
- [MVSplat: Efficient 3D Gaussian Splatting from Sparse Multi-View Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14627/) (2024)
- [Recurrent MVSNet for High-resolution Multi-view Stereo Depth Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10556/) (2019)
- [Free View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05511/) (2020)
- [Neural Volumes: Learning Dynamic Renderable Volumes from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07751/) (2019)
- [Efficient Neural Radiance Fields for Interactive Free-viewpoint Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01517/) (2021)
- [Learning-Based View Synthesis for Light Field Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02974/) (2016)
- [Underwater Image Enhancement via Medium Transmission-Guided Multi-Color Space Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13015/) (2021)
- [U-shape Transformer for Underwater Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11843/) (2021)
- [MVSGaussian: Fast Generalizable Gaussian Splatting Reconstruction from Multi-View Stereo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12218/) (2024)
- [Dense Hybrid Recurrent Multi-view Stereo Net with Dynamic Consistency Checking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10872/) (2020)
- [GaussianObject: High-Quality 3D Object Reconstruction from Four Views with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10259/) (2024)
- [WaterNeRF: Neural Radiance Fields for Underwater Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13091/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [AI-Driven Marine Robotics: Emerging Trends in Underwater Perception and Ecosystem Monitoring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01878/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Underwater scene reconstruction poses a substantial challenge because of the intricate interplay between light and the medium, resulting in scattering and absorption effects that make both depth estimation and rendering more complex. While recent Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) based methods for underwater scenes achieve high-quality results by modeling and separating the scattering medium, they still suffer from slow training and rendering speeds. To address these limitations, we propose a novel method that integrates Multi-View Stereo (MVS) with a physics-based underwater image formation model. Our approach consists of two branches: one for depth estimation using the traditional cost volume pipeline of MVS, and the other for rendering based on the physics-based image formation model. The depth branch improves scene geometry, while the medium branch determines the scattering parameters to achieve precise scene rendering. Unlike traditional MVSNet methods that rely on ground-truth depth, our method does not necessitate the use of depth truth, thus allowing for expedited training and rendering processes. By leveraging the medium subnet to estimate the medium parameters and combining this with a color MLP for rendering, we restore the true colors of underwater scenes and achieve higher-fidelity geometric representations. Experimental results show that our method enables high-quality synthesis of novel views in scattering media, clear views restoration by removing the medium, and outperforms existing methods in rendering quality and training efficiency.