Can underwater environment simulation contribute to vision tasks for autonomous systems?

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