Closer to Ground Truth: Realistic Shape and Appearance Labeled Data Generation for Unsupervised Underwater Image Segmentation

Solving fish segmentation in underwater videos, a real-world problem of great practical value in marine and aquaculture industry, is a challenging task due to the difficulty of the filming environment, poor visibility and limited existing annotated underwater fish data. In order to overcome these obstacles, we introduce a novel two stage unsupervised segmentation approach that requires no human annotations and combines artificially created and real images. Our method generates challenging synthetic training data, by placing virtual fish in real-world underwater habitats, after performing fish transformations such as Thin Plate Spline shape warping and color Histogram Matching, which realistically integrate synthetic fish into the backgrounds, making the generated images increasingly closer to the real world data with every stage of our approach. While we validate our unsupervised method on the popular DeepFish dataset, obtaining a performance close to a fully-supervised SoTA model, we further show its effectiveness on the specific case of salmon segmentation in underwater videos, for which we introduce DeepSalmon, the largest dataset of its kind in the literature (30 GB). Moreover, on both datasets we prove the capability of our approach to boost the performance of the fully-supervised SoTA model.