WaterSplat-SLAM: Photorealistic Monocular SLAM in Underwater Environment

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04642v1
• Date: Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:51:00 GMT
• Title: WaterSplat-SLAM: Photorealistic Monocular SLAM in Underwater Environment
• Abstract summary: WaterSplat-SLAM is a novel monocular underwater SLAM system that achieves robust pose estimation and photorealistic dense mapping.<n>We show that WaterSplat-SLAM achieves robust camera tracking and high-fidelity rendering in underwater environments.
• Score: 37.89513268429772
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Underwater monocular SLAM is a challenging problem with applications from autonomous underwater vehicles to marine archaeology. However, existing underwater SLAM methods struggle to produce maps with high-fidelity rendering. In this paper, we propose WaterSplat-SLAM, a novel monocular underwater SLAM system that achieves robust pose estimation and photorealistic dense mapping. Specifically, we couple semantic medium filtering into two-view 3D reconstruction prior to enable underwater-adapted camera tracking and depth estimation. Furthermore, we present a semantic-guided rendering and adaptive map management strategy with an online medium-aware Gaussian map, modeling underwater environment in a photorealistic and compact manner. Experiments on multiple underwater datasets demonstrate that WaterSplat-SLAM achieves robust camera tracking and high-fidelity rendering in underwater environments.

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