Underwater Imaging

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Overview

Underwater imaging studies how cameras and sonar sense scenes when light is absorbed and scattered, visibility is low, and images may be distorted by refraction or noise. Methods include physics-based restoration and neural enhancement, object detection and segmentation, sonar processing, and 3D reconstruction using techniques such as structure-from-motion, neural radiance fields, and Gaussian splatting. Researchers also use synthetic data, real-world benchmarks, self-supervised learning, and optical-acoustic fusion to address limited labels and changing conditions. A central challenge is making methods generalize across water clarity, lighting, sensors, and environments while improving not just visual quality but also geometry and downstream perception.

Latest papers

CardsList

72 papers6 papers in the last four weeks, down 14% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. GeoPrompt: Geometry-Conditioned Prompt Learning for Underwater Open-Vocabulary Instance Segmentation

    Oct 25, 2026Shanshan Han, Yuxi Wang, Can Qin +4Instance SegmentationPrompt Learning

    Ocean University of China, Qingdao, China · Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China

  2. Computational imaging through turbid, bubbly and flowing water near the telescope

    Oct 23, 2026Alexander Ingold, Sabina D. Menon, Aadhi Umamageswaran +4Computational ImagingUnderwater Imaging

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA · U.S. Naval Research Laboratory Remote Sensing Division, Washington DC 20375, USA. · Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA.

  3. A Paired RGB-Sonar Dataset for Fish Monitoring with Consumer Sonar

    Oct 16, 2026Mourad Derbedrosian, Michael Hobley, Pietro PeronaMultimodal DatasetUnderwater Imaging

    California Institute of Technology · UC Santa Barbara

  4. Why 3D Reconstruction Breaks Down on Under-Ice AUV Video, and How to Predict It

    Oct 14, 2026Ana-Ştefania Kogălniceanu, Klára Orbán, Ashwin Nedungadi +23D ReconstructionUnderwater 3D Reconstruction

    Babes,-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania · University of Rostock, Germany

  5. PUGS: Physics-Guided Uncertainty Modeling for Underwater Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting

    Oct 13, 2026Tingjun Li, Yuxi Wang, Guoqiang Zhong +1UQ for 3D Reconstruction3D Reconstruction

    College of Computer Science and Technology, Faculty of Information Science and Engineering, Ocean University of China, Qingdao 266100, China · New Laboratory of Pattern Recognition (NLPR), State Key Laboratory of Multimodal Artificial Intelligence Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA), and University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), Beijing 100049, China

  6. Image-Space Refraction Correction for Underwater 3D Reconstruction: Warping Flat-Port Views into Pinhole Perspective

    Oct 6, 2026Chelim Lim, Tobias Fischer, Emilio Olivastri +3Underwater ImagingUnderwater 3D Reconstruction

  7. PIC-UIE: Predicting Image-Adaptive Corrections for Lightweight Underwater Image Enhancement

    Sep 27, 2026Cunhao Zhu, Dongliang Xu, Xiangtao Kong +3Image EnhancementUnderwater Image Enhancement

    Shandong University · School of Airspace Science and Engineering, Shandong University · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University +2

  8. Odometry-Aided Real-Time Mapping for Underwater Robots Using Forward-Looking Sonar

    Sep 21, 2026Siyuan Du, Kanzhong Yao, Youdong Wang +5Occupancy Grid MappingUnderwater Imaging

    Institute of Artificial Intelligence (TeleAI), China Telecom, China. · Tongji University, Shanghai, China.

  9. LoRA Enhanced Contrastive Learning with SAS Vision Transformers

    Sep 17, 2026Dan Zimmerman, Frank E. Bobe, Amelia L. McCormack +2SAR ATRUnderwater Object Detection

    Center for Connected Autonomy & AI Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, USA · Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City Division Panama City, USA · Department of Computer Science Florida State University Tallahassee, USA

  10. Adapting Vision Foundation Models to Acoustics for Pose-Free 3D Sonar Reconstruction

    Sep 5, 2026Kevin Zhang, Jingxi Chen, Mohamad Qadri +5Underwater 3D Reconstruction3D Reconstruction

    University of Maryland, College Park · Carnegie Mellon University · University of Rhode Island +1

  11. One Model, Two Worlds: Bidirectional Sonar-Optical Translation

    Sep 5, 2026Shengji Jin, Trung Tien Dong, Ahmed Lamidi +3Image-to-Image TranslationMultimodal Diffusion Models

    University of South Florida · University of Central Florida

  12. AquaBEV: Monocular Underwater BEV Occupancy with 3D Sonar Supervision

    Sep 3, 2026Trung Tien Dong, Shengji Jin, Chen Chen +23D Occupancy PredictionUnderwater Robotics

    ERA Lab, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA. · YES Lab, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA. · University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USA.

  13. Improved Automatic Target Recognition in Synthetic Aperture Sonar Imagery Using Large Deep Neural Networks

    Sep 1, 2026C. J. Moore, Alex Hurt, Jordan MalofUnderwater ImagingVision Transformer

  14. Calibration and Comparative Analysis of Forward-Looking Sonar and 3D Sonar for Enhanced Underwater Object Recognition

    Aug 29, 2026Aditya Penumarti, Khanh Dong, Zi-Hao Zhang +6Underwater ImagingUnderwater Object Detection

    College of Engineering at the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA · Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering at the Seoul National University, Seoul 08826, South Korea · Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620, USA +1

  15. Gaussian Splatting Underwater: A Controlled Cross-Regime Study

    Aug 26, 2026Olaya Álvarez-Tuñón, Stella GraßhofUnderwater 3D Reconstruction3D Gaussian Splatting

  16. SonarLLM: A Native Sonar--Optical Multimodal Large Language Model for Underwater Perception

    Aug 25, 2026Cong Su, longxuan ma, Ling Dong +4Multimodal Sensor FusionUnderwater Imaging

    Faculty of Information Engineering and Automation, Kunming University of Science and Technology Kunming, China · Yunnan Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence Kunming, China

  17. Geometry-Driven Opti-Acoustic Co-Registration and View-Invariant Reflectivity Mapping for Side-Scan Sonar

    Aug 24, 2026Taqi Hamoda, Nuno GraciasCross-Modal Image RegistrationUnderwater Imaging

    Computer Vision and Robotics Research Institute (ViCOROB) of the University of Girona, Spain

  18. BenthicFlow: Generating Extensible Underwater Environments via Flow Matching

    Aug 24, 2026Joaquín Figueira, Camile Lendering, Manfred Gonzalez-Hernandez +33D Scene GenerationUnderwater Imaging

    AIMS Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

  19. AquaFlow: A Monocular Gaussian Splatting SLAM for Underwater Streaming Reconstruction

    Aug 24, 2026Yingxiang Xu, Kerui Ren, Wenqi Guo +4Underwater 3D Reconstruction3DGS SLAM

    Zhejiang University · Shanghai AI Laboratory · Shanghai Jiao Tong University +3

  20. Dynamic SpectraFormer for Ultra-High-Definition Underwater Image Enhancement

    Aug 19, 2026Zhiqiang Hu, Tao Yu, Shouren Huang +1Underwater Image EnhancementUnderwater Imaging

    Research Institute for Science & Technology, Tokyo University of Science · Tokyo Institute of Technology

  21. Underwater Color Restoration with Vanishing Uncertainty

    Aug 16, 2026Grigory Solomatov, Derya AkkaynakUnderwater ImagingUnderwater Image Enhancement

    Hatter Department of Marine Technologies, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel · Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences, Eilat, Israel

  22. A Multi-Annotator Study of Segmentation Noise and Uncertainty in Turbid Underwater Images

    Aug 15, 2026Galadrielle Humblot-Renaux, Vasiliki Ismiroglou, Malte PedersenSegmentation Uncertainty EstimationImage Segmentation

    Visual Analysis and Perception Laboratory, Aalborg University, Denmark · Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Denmark

  23. ππ-SUB: A Physics-Informed Synthetic Underwater Benchmark Dataset for Underwater Image Enhancement

    Aug 11, 2026Namritha Lasyapriya Maddali, Rajini Makam, Suresh Sundaram +1Underwater Image EnhancementUnderwater Imaging

    Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. · Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

  24. Degradation-Guided Underwater Image Restoration with Task-Oriented Latent Control

    Aug 9, 2026Xu Zhang, Xuhui Cao, Kangzhe Yuan +5Underwater Image EnhancementUnderwater Imaging

    National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia Software, School of Computer Science, Wuhan University · School of Computer and Artificial Intelligence, Zhengzhou University · Aerospace Information Research Institute, Henan Academy of Sciences +2

  25. SCTD 3.0: Sonar Common Target Detection in the Wild - A Large-Scale, Multi-Scene Dataset from Real Marine Surveys

    Aug 8, 2026Peng ZhangUnderwater ImagingUnderwater Object Detection

  26. Swimm3R: Splatting with Medium-aware SfM for Underwater 3D Reconstruction

    Aug 2, 2026Minseong Kweon, Junaed Sattar3D Gaussian SplattingUnderwater Imaging

    Department of Computer Science & Engineering and the Minnesota Robotics Institute (MnRI), University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN 55455 USA

  27. A Comparison of Data Augmentation Methods for Training Deep Neural Networks on Synthetic Aperture Sonar

    Jul 26, 2026C. J. Moore, Gregory D. Vetaw, Jordan MalofSynthetic Data AugmentationData Augmentation

    University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, USA · Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City Division, Panama City, Florida, USA

  28. DY-LUT: Depth-Aware YCbCr Lookup Tables for Real-Time Underwater Image Enhancement

    Jul 24, 2026Cunhao Zhu, Xiangtao Kong, Dongliang Xu +3Image EnhancementUnderwater Image Enhancement

    1Shandong University · 2The Hong Kong Polytechnic University · 3Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence

  29. CLUIE: Clustering-Aware Recurrent Propagation with Local Structural Compensation for Underwater Image Enhancement

    Jul 23, 2026Kui Jiang, Zefan Feng, Laibin Chang +3Underwater Image EnhancementUnderwater Imaging

    School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China · School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

  30. WAT3R: Feedforward Underwater 3D Reconstruction

    Jul 23, 2026Jiayi Xu, Jiahao Lu, Ziqiang Zheng +4Underwater Imaging3D Reconstruction

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · The Chinese University of Hong Kong · Peking University