Underwater object tracking is challenging due to wavelength-dependent attenuation and scattering, which severely distort appearance across depths and water conditions. Existing trackers trained on terrestrial data fail to generalize to these physics-driven degradations. We present MANTA, a physics-informed framework integrating representation learning with tracking design for underwater scenarios. We propose a dual-positive contrastive learning strategy coupling temporal consistency with Beer–Lambert augmentations to yield features robust to both temporal and underwater distortions. We further introduce a multi-stage pipeline augmenting motion-based tracking with a physics-informed secondary association algorithm that integrates geometric consistency and appearance similarity for re-identification under occlusion and drift. To complement standard IoU metrics, we propose Center–Scale Consistency (CSC) and Geometric Alignment Score (GAS) to assess geometric fidelity. Experiments on four underwater benchmarks (WebUOT-1M, UOT32, UTB180, UWCOT220) show that MANTA achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving Success AUC by up to 6%, while ensuring stable long-term generalized underwater tracking and efficient runtime. Code available at https://github.com/Kazedaa/MANTA.

With the rise of marine exploration, underwater imaging has gained significant attention as a research topic. Under-water video enhancement has become crucial for real-time computer vision tasks in marine exploration. However, most existing methods focus on enhancing individual frames and neglect video temporal dynamics, leading to visually poor enhancements. Furthermore, the lack of ground-truth references limits the use of abundant available underwater video data in many applications. To address these issues, we propose a two-stage framework for enhancing underwater videos. The first stage uses a denoising diffusion probabilistic model to learn a generative prior from unlabeled data, capturing robust and descriptive feature representations. In the second stage, this prior is incorporated into a physics-based image formulation for spatial enhancement, while also enforcing temporal consistency between video frames. Our method enables real-time and computationally-efficient processing of high-resolution underwater videos at lower resolutions, and offers efficient enhancement in the presence of diverse water-types. Extensive experiments on four datasets show that our approach generalizes well and outperforms existing enhancement methods. Our code is available at github. com/suhas-srinath/undive.

Underwater imaging presents numerous challenges due to refraction, light absorption, and scattering, resulting in color degradation, low contrast, and blurriness. Enhancing underwater images is crucial for high-level computer vision tasks, but existing methods either neglect the physics-based image formation process or require expensive computations. In this paper, we propose an effective framework that combines a physics-based Underwater Image Formation Model (UIFM) with a deep image enhancement approach based on the retinex model. Firstly, we remove backscatter by estimating attenuation coefficients using depth information. Then, we employ a retinex model-based deep image enhancement module to enhance the images. To ensure adherence to the UIFM, we introduce a novel Wideband Attenuation prior. The proposed PhISH-Net framework achieves real-time processing of high-resolution underwater images using a lightweight neural network and a bilateral-grid-based upsampler. Extensive experiments on two underwater image datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to state-of-the-art techniques. Additionally, qualitative evaluation on a cross-dataset scenario confirms its generalization capability. Our contributions lie in combining the physics-based UIFM with deep image enhancement methods, introducing the wideband attenuation prior, and achieving superior performance and efficiency.

Accurate prediction of solar irradiance is essential for optimizing renewable energy sources in distributed generation systems due to its significant impact on solar power generation. Despite notable advancements, the inherent variability of irradiance presents challenges for existing models. In this article, we introduce a novel approach for irradiance forecasting using a cascaded combination of regressors applied to transformed process variables. Our method utilizes a gradient-boosted decision tree as the primary regressor to generate initial predictions, which are subsequently refined by a support vector regressor acting as an error correction module. Notably, the secondary regressor's kernel, alongside other hyperparameters, is dynamically learned through reinforcement learning with an RNN-based controller. Evaluation results demonstrate that our prediction-correction framework achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches, as indicated by RMSE, MAE, and$\text{R}^{2}$score metrics. Thorough comparative analysis highlights the model's enhanced accuracy and its potential for precise irradiance forecasting.