WaterSplatting: Fast Underwater 3D Scene Reconstruction Using Gaussian Splatting
This addresses the problem of slow training and lack of real-time rendering in underwater reconstruction for applications like naval robots and VR, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods.
The paper tackles underwater 3D scene reconstruction by fusing volumetric rendering with 3D Gaussian Splatting to handle scattering media, achieving state-of-the-art rendering quality on the SeaThru-NeRF dataset with real-time performance.
The underwater 3D scene reconstruction is a challenging, yet interesting problem with applications ranging from naval robots to VR experiences. The problem was successfully tackled by fully volumetric NeRF-based methods which can model both the geometry and the medium (water). Unfortunately, these methods are slow to train and do not offer real-time rendering. More recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) method offered a fast alternative to NeRFs. However, because it is an explicit method that renders only the geometry, it cannot render the medium and is therefore unsuited for underwater reconstruction. Therefore, we propose a novel approach that fuses volumetric rendering with 3DGS to handle underwater data effectively. Our method employs 3DGS for explicit geometry representation and a separate volumetric field (queried once per pixel) for capturing the scattering medium. This dual representation further allows the restoration of the scenes by removing the scattering medium. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art NeRF-based methods in rendering quality on the underwater SeaThru-NeRF dataset. Furthermore, it does so while offering real-time rendering performance, addressing the efficiency limitations of existing methods. Web: https://water-splatting.github.io