MuS-Polar3D: A Benchmark Dataset for Computational Polarimetric 3D Imaging under Multi-Scattering Conditions

TL;DR

MuS-Polar3D is the first comprehensive benchmark dataset for polarization-based underwater 3D imaging under various scattering conditions, facilitating fair evaluation and development of reconstruction algorithms.

Contribution

The paper introduces MuS-Polar3D, a diverse, publicly available dataset with controlled scattering conditions, supporting multiple vision tasks for underwater 3D imaging research.

Findings

Effective decoupling of descattering and 3D reconstruction stages.

Achieved a mean angular error of 15.49 degrees in evaluations.

Demonstrated the dataset's utility for fair comparison of algorithms.

Abstract

Polarization-based underwater 3D imaging exploits polarization cues to suppress background scattering, exhibiting distinct advantages in turbid water. Although data-driven polarization-based underwater 3D reconstruction methods show great potential, existing public datasets lack sufficient diversity in scattering and observation conditions, hindering fair comparisons among different approaches, including single-view and multi-view polarization imaging methods. To address this limitation, we construct MuS-Polar3D, a benchmark dataset comprising polarization images of 42 objects captured under seven quantitatively controlled scattering conditions and five viewpoints, together with high-precision 3D models (+/- 0.05 mm accuracy), normal maps, and foreground masks. The dataset supports multiple vision tasks, including normal estimation, object segmentation, descattering, and 3D reconstruction. Inspired by computational imaging, we further decouple underwater 3D reconstruction under scattering into a two-stage pipeline, namely descattering followed by 3D reconstruction, from an imaging-chain perspective. Extensive evaluations using multiple baseline methods under complex scattering conditions demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed benchmark, achieving a best mean angular error of 15.49 degrees. To the best of our knowledge, MuS-Polar3D is the first publicly available benchmark dataset for quantitative turbidity underwater polarization-based 3D imaging, enabling accurate reconstruction and fair algorithm evaluation under controllable scattering conditions. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/WangPuyun/MuS-Polar3D.