3D-USE: From Image-Level to Scene-Level Underwater Enhancement

Abstract

Underwater scene reconstruction from degraded views can preserve visual degradation. Since paired enhanced 3D references are hard to obtain in real ocean scenes, underwater 3D methods largely rely on physics-based restoration. However, separating object radiance from medium effects is ill-posed and may leave residual artifacts. In contrast, we formulate underwater scene enhancement as learning the desired appearance of the scene and propose a two-stage framework called 3D-USE. Stage 1 builds a medium-aware Gaussian scene with MediumRBF, sharing medium estimates across nearby views and establishing stable geometry and visibility. Using a prior learned from external 2D enhancement pairs, Stage 2 applies Appearance Transition Consensus (ATC) to calibrate and aggregate view-wise appearance changes, defining the desired scene-level appearance transformation. Finally, an Underwater Bilateral Appearance Field (U-BAF) jointly adjusts object radiance and medium appearance to produce coherent enhanced appearance across viewpoints. Experiments show that 3D-USE improves novel-view enhancement and cross-view consistency while maintaining competitive reconstruction quality. The project page and code are available at https://bilityniu.github.io/3D-USE/.

arXiv commentProject page: https://bilityniu.github.io/3D-USE/