The challenging setting underwater, and in particular in the oceans, often let standard computer vision approaches struggle or become unsuitable. Refraction at underwater housings can invalidate the pinhole camera model and create focus issues. Scattering and absorption of light drastically change the appearance of objects with viewpoint and typically limit visibility to just a few meters. Deeper waters are inaccessible to divers, making in-situ calibration very difficult and are deprived of natural light, which requires robots to use co-moving spotlights in the dark.

Yet, the oceans cover more than 70% of our planet and more than 50% of Earth's surface lies beyond 1000m depth, most of which we still have to discover. The use of cameras and robotic platforms in the oceans is growing fast, and ocean scientists are gathering huge amounts of visual data with a clear need for robust and reliable methods for quantification, mapping, classification and understanding.

Industry is mining resources from the deep sea and offshore installations are built and need to be maintained. The UN have declared the Decade of the Ocean Science, and countries and international communities want to improve health and keep good status of their waters, increasing the need for understanding, quantification and monitoring.

The vision community has a compelling opportunity to significantly impact this important domain.

The workshop aims to bring together experts and researchers interested in learning about the challenges, current work and opportunities in underwater vision, which include (but are not limited to)

– image restoration and visibility improvement

– refractive geometry and underwater observation models

– physical models, quantitative imaging and visual simulation

– multi-spectral, hyper-spectral imaging or other modalities

– visual underwater robotics

– visual measuring, mapping and monitoring

– appearance, shape and motion of life or structures at the seafloor or in the open water

– habitat, substrate classification or segmentation

– visual characterization or quantification of marine life or processes

– robust algorithms to cope with marine snow, smoke or other nuisances

– detection, tracking and classification, ocean semantics

Tentative schedule:

Submission deadline  June 30, 2021

Decision           August 1, 2021

Camera ready      August 15, 2021

Workshop          mid October (ICCV)