Water surface modeling from a single viewpoint video
Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 11, 2026

Measuring the Structure, Composition, and Change of Underwater Environments with Large-area Imaging
Published on: April 18, 2025
Chuan Li1, David Pickup, Thomas Saunders
1Department of Computer Science, University of Bath, Bath, United Kingdom BA2 7AY. c.li@bath.ac.uk
Abstract:
We introduce a video-based approach for producing water surface models. Recent advances in this field output high-quality results but require dedicated capturing devices and only work in limited conditions. In contrast, our method achieves a good tradeoff between the visual quality and the production cost: It automatically produces a visually plausible animation using a single viewpoint video as the input. Our approach is based on two discoveries: first, shape from shading (SFS) is adequate to capture the appearance and dynamic behavior of the example water; second, shallow water model can be used to estimate a velocity field that produces complex surface dynamics. We will provide qualitative evaluation of our method and demonstrate its good performance across a wide range of scenes.
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