MANTA: Physics-Informed Generalized Underwater Object Tracking

Suhas Srinath, Hemang Jamadagni, Aditya Chandrasekar, Prathosh A P; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2026, pp. 3472-3482

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.