AquaScope: Reliable Underwater Image Transmission on Mobile Devices
Beitong Tian, Lingzhi Zhao, Bo Chen, Mingyuan Wu, Haozhen Zheng, Deepak Vasisht, Francis Y. Yan, Klara Nahrstedt
TL;DR
Underwater wireless channels impose severe bandwidth limits and high error rates, making image transmission on mobile devices challenging. AquaScope addresses this by combining generative image compression with context-aware token distillation and error-resilient fine-tuning, plus PHY-layer reliability through enhanced packetization and time synchronization. The system, implemented on Android and evaluated in real underwater environments, transmits 256 by 256 color images with perceptual quality (LPIPS around 0.3) and BER reduction from about 19% to below 2% over distances up to 20 m, achieving end-to-end latency around 9.2 s. This work enables practical, accessible underwater imaging with commodity devices, opening new possibilities for recreational and professional diving and underwater exploration.
Abstract
Underwater communication is essential for both recreational and scientific activities, such as scuba diving. However, existing methods remain highly constrained by environmental challenges and often require specialized hardware, driving research into more accessible underwater communication solutions. While recent acoustic-based communication systems support text messaging on mobile devices, their low data rates severely limit broader applications. We present AquaScope, the first acoustic communication system capable of underwater image transmission on commodity mobile devices. To address the key challenges of underwater environments -- limited bandwidth and high transmission errors -- AquaScope employs and enhances generative image compression to improve compression efficiency, and integrates it with reliability-enhancement techniques at the physical layer to strengthen error resilience. We implemented AquaScope on the Android platform and demonstrated its feasibility for underwater image transmission. Experimental results show that AquaScope enables reliable, low-latency image transmission while preserving perceptual image quality, across various bandwidth-constrained and error-prone underwater conditions.