Gaussian Splatting Underwater: A Controlled Cross-Regime Study

Underwater scene reconstruction is essential for immersive exploration of aquatic environments, yet remains challenging due to complex participating-media effects such as absorption and scattering, as well as the limited field of view (FoV) of conventional cameras. Although combining panoramic imaging with 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) offers a promising direction for photorealistic underwater rendering, traditional 3DGS struggles with both spherical projection distortion and underwater medium degradation. In this paper, we propose \textbf{Underwater360}, a physics-informed omnidirectional 3DGS framework for underwater panoramic scene reconstruction. First, we introduce an Omnidirectional Gaussian Splatting module that performs ray casting directly in spherical camera space instead of relying on 2D projection approximations, thereby reducing geometric distortions under 360$^\circ$ FoV. Second, we design a physics-based appearance-medium modeling architecture with pose-conditioned appearance embeddings to explicitly decouple intrinsic scene radiance from depth-dependent backscatter and attenuation, enabling physically grounded scene appearance restoration. Finally, we establish a new panoramic underwater benchmark dataset containing both synthetic and real-world scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Underwater360 achieves superior performance in underwater novel view synthesis and scene appearance restoration, delivering improved rendering quality and cross-view consistency in complex underwater environments. The code and datasets are released at https://github.com/SwcK423/Underwater360

Underwater 3D reconstruction and appearance restoration remain challenging due to the complex optical properties of water, such as wavelength-dependent attenuation and scattering. Existing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)-based approaches often suffer from slow rendering and limited practicality, while vanilla 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) lacks an effective mechanism to account for underwater degradation. To address this, we propose WaterClear-GS, a physics-informed reformulation of underwater Gaussian splatting that models degradation as intrinsic Gaussian attributes rather than external medium fields. Furthermore, we adopt a dual-branch optimization strategy that preserves underwater photometric consistency while encouraging a practical separation between restoration-oriented latent clean appearance and degradation. This strategy is enhanced by depth-guided geometry regularization and perception-driven image supervision, together with exposure constraints, spatially adaptive regularization, and physics-informed spectral regularization, which collectively promote spatial coherence and plausible visual appearance. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks and our collected dataset demonstrate that WaterClear-GS achieves strong performance on both novel view synthesis (NVS) and underwater image restoration (UIR) tasks, while maintaining 160+ FPS real-time rendering. The code will be available at https://sherii888.github.io/WaterClear-GS/.

We propose Swimm3R, a unified framework that combines medium-aware structure-from-motion (SfM) with Underwater Beta Splatting to address scattering- and attenuation-induced failures in underwater 3D reconstruction. Swimm3R distills in-air geometric priors into a feed-forward backbone and uses a physics head to regress underwater image-formation parameters, camera poses, and restored point clouds. Additionally, we introduce Underwater Beta Splatting, which extends Gaussian splatting with Beta primitives and scattering-aware geometric gradients for stable underwater geometry representation. We further establish the Barbados underwater video dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in challenging underwater environments. On this dataset, Swimm3R robustly recovers underwater scene structure under challenging scattering conditions, yielding coherent seafloor geometry. Using these predicted point clouds, the proposed Underwater Beta Splatting improves average PSNR by $1.47$ dB over WaterSplatting while increasing downstream localization performance by $2.0$ and $2.4$ percentage points in RRA@15 and RTA@15, respectively.