UEOF: A Benchmark Dataset for Underwater Event-Based Optical Flow
This work addresses a problem for researchers in underwater robotics and computer vision by providing a dataset to develop and evaluate perception algorithms, though it is incremental as it focuses on dataset creation rather than novel method development.
The authors tackled the lack of datasets for event-based optical flow in underwater environments by introducing the first synthetic underwater benchmark dataset, which includes realistic event data streams with dense ground-truth flow, depth, and camera motion, and they benchmarked state-of-the-art methods to evaluate motion estimation accuracy.
Underwater imaging is fundamentally challenging due to wavelength-dependent light attenuation, strong scattering from suspended particles, turbidity-induced blur, and non-uniform illumination. These effects impair standard cameras and make ground-truth motion nearly impossible to obtain. On the other hand, event cameras offer microsecond resolution and high dynamic range. Nonetheless, progress on investigating event cameras for underwater environments has been limited due to the lack of datasets that pair realistic underwater optics with accurate optical flow. To address this problem, we introduce the first synthetic underwater benchmark dataset for event-based optical flow derived from physically-based ray-traced RGBD sequences. Using a modern video-to-event pipeline applied to rendered underwater videos, we produce realistic event data streams with dense ground-truth flow, depth, and camera motion. Moreover, we benchmark state-of-the-art learning-based and model-based optical flow prediction methods to understand how underwater light transport affects event formation and motion estimation accuracy. Our dataset establishes a new baseline for future development and evaluation of underwater event-based perception algorithms. The source code and dataset for this project are publicly available at https://robotic-vision-lab.github.io/ueof.