From Physically Based to Generative Models: A Survey on Underwater Image Synthesis Techniques.

The underwater world has gained significant attention in research in recent years, particularly in the context of ocean exploration. Images serve as a valuable data source for underwater tasks, but they face several issues related to light behavior in this environment. Given the complexity of capturing data from the sea and the large variability of environmental components (depth, distance, suspended particles, turbidity, etc.), synthesized underwater scenes can provide relevant data to improve image processing algorithms and computer vision tasks. The main goal of this survey is to summarize techniques to underwater image synthesis, their contributions and correlations, and to highlight further directions and opportunities in this research domain.