NeuroPump: Simultaneous Geometric and Color Rectification for Underwater Images

Underwater image restoration aims to remove geometric and color distortions due to water refraction, absorption, and scattering. Previous studies focus on restoring either color or geometry, but to our best knowledge, not both. However, in practice it may be cumbersome to address the two rectifications one by one. In this paper, we propose NeuroPump, a self-supervised method to simultaneously optimize and rectify underwater geometry and color as if water were pumped out. The key idea is to explicitly model refraction, absorption, and scattering in Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) pipeline, such that it not only performs simultaneous geometric and color rectification, but also enables to synthesize novel views and optical effects by controlling the decoupled parameters. In addition, to address the lack of real paired ground truth images, we propose an underwater 360 benchmark dataset that has real paired (i.e., with and without water) images. Our method clearly outperforms other baselines both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our code and dataset is available at https://ygswu.github.io/NeuroPump.github.io/.