The Sea Urchin Detector Trained in a Synthetic Ocean

Labeled underwater imagery is costly, so the team extended an IsaacSim-based OceanSim environment with an automatic synthetic-data pipeline. It can vary scene appearance, structure and sensor settings while producing photorealistic images and labels. A real-world sea-urchin detector served as the sim-to-real test, with experiments probing how kinds of scene variation affect transfer. The authors release code and emphasize remaining limits in rendering fidelity, diversity and generalization rather than claiming that synthetic data replaces field collection.