Can underwater environment simulation contribute to vision tasks for autonomous systems

Abstract

To simulate the underwater environment and test\nalgorithms for autonomous underwater vehicles, we developed\nan underwater simulation environment with the Unreal Engine 4\nto generate underwater visual data such as seagrass and\nlandscape. We then used such data from the Unreal environment\nto train and verify an underwater image segmentation model,\nwhich is an important technology to later achieve visual based\nnavigation. The simulation environment shows the potentials for\ndataset generalization and testing robot vision algorithms.