Estimating 3D geometry in underwater environments presents unique challenges due to light attenuation, scattering, and
the absence of large-scale, high-quality 3D annotations. Pioneering methods rely on massive dense annotations that are
impractical in underwater settings. In this paper, we propose Wat3R, a cross-domain semi-supervised
learning framework designed to adapt feed-forward 3D reconstruction models from air to underwater scenes. Uniquely, our
method eliminates the need for any annotated underwater data following a teacher-student architecture, that learns
robust geometry representations merely on abundant unlabeled real underwater video footage. We also design a cross-view
consistency loss that leverages geometric cues from other views to compensate for the information degradation in the
current view caused by water attenuation and scattering.
Furthermore, considering the lack of comprehensive evaluation benchmarks, we construct Water3D, a
diverse dataset covering various water bodies and underwater scenarios, designed for geometric task evaluation.
Experimental results demonstrate that Wat3R outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in underwater
multi-view depth estimation and point cloud reconstruction.
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1@inproceedings{ren2026wat3r,
2 title={Wat3R: Underwater 3D Geometry Learning without Annotations},
3 author={Ren, Jiangwei and Jiang, Xingyu and Song, Zijie and Xu, Wei and Lin, Hongkai and Liang, Dingkang and Bai, Xiang},
4 booktitle={Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision},
5 year={2026}
6}