UDR-GS: Enhancing Underwater Dynamic Scene Reconstruction with Depth Regularization

Abstract

Representing and rendering dynamic underwater scenes present significant challenges due to the medium’s inherent properties, which result in image blurring and information ambiguity. To overcome these challenges and accomplish real-time rendering of dynamic underwater environments while maintaining efficient training and storage, we propose Underwater Dynamic Scene Reconstruction Gaussian Splatting (UDR-GS), a method based on Gaussian Splatting. By leveraging prior information from a pre-trained depth estimation model and smoothness constraints between adjacent images, our approach uses the estimated depth as a geometric prior to aid in color-based optimization, significantly reducing artifacts and improving geometric accuracy. By integrating depth guidance into the Gaussian Splatting (GS) optimization process, we achieve more precise geometric estimations. To ensure higher stability, smoothness constraints are applied between adjacent images, maintaining consistent depth for neighboring 3D points in the absence of boundary conditions. The symmetry concept is inherently applied in our method by maintaining uniform depth and color information across multiple viewpoints, which enhances the reconstruction quality and visual coherence. Using 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) as a baseline, our strategy demonstrates superior performance in both RGB novel view synthesis and 3D geometric reconstruction. On average, across multiple datasets, our method shows an improvement of approximately 1.41% in PSNR and a 0.75% increase in SSIM compared with the baseline 4DGS method, significantly enhancing the visual quality and geometric fidelity of dynamic underwater scenes.