SeaSplat: Representing Underwater Scenes with 3D Gaussian Splatting and a Physically Grounded Image Formation Model
This work addresses the challenge of underwater scene rendering for applications like marine robotics or visualization, but it is incremental as it adapts an existing method to a specific domain.
The authors tackled the problem of real-time rendering of underwater scenes by constraining 3D Gaussian Splatting with a physically grounded underwater image formation model, resulting in increased quantitative performance on novel viewpoint rendering and the ability to recover true scene colors and remove medium effects.
We introduce SeaSplat, a method to enable real-time rendering of underwater scenes leveraging recent advances in 3D radiance fields. Underwater scenes are challenging visual environments, as rendering through a medium such as water introduces both range and color dependent effects on image capture. We constrain 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), a recent advance in radiance fields enabling rapid training and real-time rendering of full 3D scenes, with a physically grounded underwater image formation model. Applying SeaSplat to the real-world scenes from SeaThru-NeRF dataset, a scene collected by an underwater vehicle in the US Virgin Islands, and simulation-degraded real-world scenes, not only do we see increased quantitative performance on rendering novel viewpoints from the scene with the medium present, but are also able to recover the underlying true color of the scene and restore renders to be without the presence of the intervening medium. We show that the underwater image formation helps learn scene structure, with better depth maps, as well as show that our improvements maintain the significant computational improvements afforded by leveraging a 3D Gaussian representation.