# AquaFlow: A Monocular Gaussian Splatting SLAM for Underwater Streaming Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.22906 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.22906/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [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)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Grounding Image Matching in 3D with MASt3R](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09756/) (2024)
- [DROID-SLAM: Deep Visual SLAM for Monocular, Stereo, and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10869/) (2021)
- [TartanAir: A Dataset to Push the Limits of Visual SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14338/) (2020)
- [Gaussian Splatting SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06741/) (2023)
- [MASt3R-SLAM: Real-Time Dense SLAM with 3D Reconstruction Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12392/) (2024)
- [VGGT-SLAM: Dense RGB SLAM Optimized on the SL(4) Manifold](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12549/) (2025)
- [SeaThru-NeRF: Neural Radiance Fields in Scattering Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07743/) (2023)
- [Splat-SLAM: Globally Optimized RGB-only SLAM with 3D Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16544/) (2024)
- [WaterSplatting: Fast Underwater 3D Scene Reconstruction Using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08206/) (2024)
- [SeaSplat: Representing Underwater Scenes with 3D Gaussian Splatting and a Physically Grounded Image Formation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.17345/) (2024)
- [On-the-fly Reconstruction for Large-Scale Novel View Synthesis from Unposed Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05558/) (2025)
- [VGGT-SLAM 2.0: Real-time Dense Feed-forward Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19887/) (2026)
- [Compact 3D Gaussian Splatting For Dense Visual SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11247/) (2024)
- [HI-SLAM2: Geometry-Aware Gaussian SLAM for Fast Monocular Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17982/) (2024)
- [UW-GS: Distractor-Aware 3D Gaussian Splatting for Enhanced Underwater Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01517/) (2024)
- [Outdoor Monocular SLAM with Global Scale-Consistent 3D Gaussian Pointmaps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03737/) (2025)
- [FLSea: Underwater Visual-Inertial and Stereo-Vision Forward-Looking Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12772/) (2023)
- [Experimental Comparison of Open Source Visual-Inertial-Based State Estimation Algorithms in the Underwater Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02215/) (2019)
- [Real-Time Dense 3D Mapping of Underwater Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02704/) (2023)
- [High Definition, Inexpensive, Underwater Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05640/) (2022)
- [Real-time Monocular Visual Odometry for Turbid and Dynamic Underwater Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05842/) (2018)
- [Knowledge Distillation for Feature Extraction in Underwater VSLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17981/) (2023)
- [RUSplatting: Robust 3D Gaussian Splatting for Sparse-View Underwater Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15737/) (2025)
- [UW-3DGS: Underwater 3D Reconstruction with Physics-Aware Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06169/) (2025)
- [WaterSplat-SLAM: Photorealistic Monocular SLAM in Underwater Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04642/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent monocular 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) streaming reconstruction methods have achieved impressive performance by balancing reconstruction quality and efficiency. However, extending these frameworks to underwater scenes remains challenging due to severe visual degradation, such as light attenuation and scattering, which degrades camera pose tracking and distorts scene geometry. To address these challenges, we propose AquaFlow, a monocular Gaussian Splatting streaming reconstruction framework for efficient and high-fidelity underwater reconstruction. Specifically, AquaFlow fine-tunes a 3D vision foundation model on large-scale underwater data for robust pose and pointmap estimation, and introduces a medium-guided incremental Gaussian initialization strategy for streaming mapping. Furthermore, we develop a streaming-compatible hybrid scene representation that integrates structured, distance-conditioned neural Gaussians with a physics-inspired optical model to compensate for underwater image formation effects, enabling accurate scene reconstruction. We evaluate AquaFlow on a comprehensive dataset of 62 diverse underwater trajectories, collected from both public benchmarks and in-the-wild web videos across various scales. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AquaFlow achieves state-of-the-art tracking and rendering performance, reducing average localization error by 13.2% and improving PSNR by 4.74 dB compared to WaterSplat-SLAM.