Geometry beneath the Waves: Dense Priors for Sparse-View Underwater 3D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract

Underwater 3D reconstruction supports applications ranging from marine ecosystem monitoring and subsea inspection to underwater archaeology, education, and immersive visualisation. 3D Gaussian Splatting has made real-time photorealistic novel-view rendering practical, while underwater variants incorporate physically based image-formation models to separate medium effects from scene radiance. Their reconstruction quality, however, remains fundamentally limited by the geometry used for initialisation.