AquaSplatting: A Hybrid 3D Representation for Robust Underwater Scene Reconstruction via Dual-Branch Rendering
Jiangbei Hu, Haobo Wang, Baixin Xu, Nan Ding, Zhimao Lu, Na Lei, Ying He
Abstract
While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) excels at real-time rendering of standard scenes, it struggles to reconstruct underwater environments due to severe challenges such as light scattering, color attenuation, and sparse coverage of Gaussian kernels in far-field aqueous regions. To address this, we introduce AquaSplatting, a hybrid framework that combines explicit and implicit modeling methods for robust underwater scene reconstruction. Our dual-branch architecture employs 3DGS in a geometry-guided branch to model solid surfaces like the seabed, while a medium-aware branch uses a compact, view-dependent MLP to represent volumetric water effects. Furthermore, a neural underwater hybrid rendering mechanism adaptively fuses these two representations based on accumulated opacity. Thanks to this dual-branch framework, our method can also synthesize restored images without water medium. To enhance efficiency, our proposed engagement-based pruning (EBP) strategy quantifies each Gaussian
BibTeX
@inproceedings{aaai2026_aquasplattingahy,
title = {AquaSplatting: A Hybrid 3D Representation for Robust Underwater Scene Reconstruction via Dual-Branch Rendering},
author = {Jiangbei Hu and Haobo Wang and Baixin Xu and Nan Ding and Zhimao Lu and Na Lei and Ying He},
booktitle = {AAAI 2026},
year = {2026}
}