# WaterFlow: Explicit Physics-Prior Rectified Flow for Underwater Saliency Mask Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12605 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12605/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Inverse problems and image restoration, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 16 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Inverse problems and image restoration](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/inverse-problems-and-image-restoration/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [PVT v2: Improved Baselines with Pyramid Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13797/) (2021)
- [Structure-measure: A New Way to Evaluate Foreground Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00786/) (2017)
- [U2-Net: Going Deeper with Nested U-Structure for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09007/) (2020)
- [Enhanced-alignment Measure for Binary Foreground Map Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10421/) (2018)
- [SegDiff: Image Segmentation with Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00390/) (2021)
- [Multi-scale Interactive Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09062/) (2020)
- [Semantic Segmentation of Underwater Imagery: Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01241/) (2020)
- [VSCode: General Visual Salient and Camouflaged Object Detection with 2D Prompt Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15011/) (2023)
- [Simultaneous Enhancement and Super-Resolution of Underwater Imagery for Improved Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01155/) (2020)
- [Diving into Underwater: Segment Anything Model Guided Underwater Salient Instance Segmentation and A Large-scale Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06039/) (2024)
- [CamoDiffusion: Camouflaged Object Detection via Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17932/) (2023)
- [SVAM: Saliency-guided Visual Attention Modeling by Autonomous Underwater Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06252/) (2020)
- [Recurrent Multi-scale Transformer for High-Resolution Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03826/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [ORSIFlow: Saliency-Guided Rectified Flow for Optical Remote Sensing Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28584/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Conditional Generation for Underwater Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01825/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Underwater Salient Object Detection (USOD) faces significant challenges, including underwater image quality degradation and domain gaps. Existing methods tend to ignore the physical principles of underwater imaging or simply treat degradation phenomena in underwater images as interference factors that must be eliminated, failing to fully exploit the valuable information they contain. We propose WaterFlow, a rectified flow-based framework for underwater salient object detection that innovatively incorporates underwater physical imaging information as explicit priors directly into the network training process and introduces temporal dimension modeling, significantly enhancing the model's capability for salient object identification. On the USOD10K dataset, WaterFlow achieves a 0.072 gain in S_m, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of our method. https://github.com/Theo-polis/WaterFlow.