CADDY Underwater Stereo-Vision Dataset for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) in the Context of Diver Activities

In this article we present a novel underwater dataset collected from several field trials within the EU FP7 project "Cognitive autonomous diving buddy (CADDY)", where an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) was used to interact with divers and monitor their activities. To our knowledge, this is one of the first efforts to collect a large dataset in underwater environments targeting object classification, segmentation and human pose estimation tasks. The first part of the dataset contains stereo camera recordings (~10K) of divers performing hand gestures to communicate and interact with an AUV in different environmental conditions. These gestures samples serve to test the robustness of object detection and classification algorithms against underwater image distortions i.e., color attenuation and light backscatter. The second part includes stereo footage (~12.7K) of divers free-swimming in front of the AUV, along with synchronized IMUs measurements located throughout the diver's suit (DiverNet) which serve as ground-truth for human pose and tracking methods. In both cases, these rectified images allow investigation of 3D representation and reasoning pipelines from low-texture targets commonly present in underwater scenarios. In this paper we describe our recording platform, sensor calibration procedure plus the data format and the utilities provided to use the dataset.