OpenWaters: Photorealistic Simulations For Underwater Computer Vision

In this paper, we present OpenWaters, a real-time open-source underwater simulation kit for generating photorealistic underwater scenes. OpenWaters supports creation of massive amount of underwater images by emulating diverse real-world conditions. It allows for fine controls over every variable in a simulation instance, including geometry, rendering parameters like ray-traced water caustics, scattering, and ground-truth labels. Using underwater depth (distance between camera and object) estimation as the use-case, we showcase and validate the capabilities of OpenWaters to model underwater scenes that are used to train a deep neural network for depth estimation. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates depth estimation using synthetic underwater images with high accuracy, and feasibility of transfer-learning of features from synthetic to real-world images.