uScenes: A Multimodal RGB and 3D Sonar Dataset for Underwater Robot Perception
Authors: Trung Tien Dong, Zhenqi Wu, Aditya Penumarti, Zi-Hao Zhang, Micaiah Bartlett, Jane Shin, Xiaomin Lin
Organizations: Embodied Robotics and Automation Lab, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33610, USA · Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA · Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering at the Seoul National University, Seoul 08826, South Korea
Robust perception is essential for the deployment of autonomous underwater robots. However, optical cameras become unreliable under poor illumination and backscatter. Forward looking (2D) acoustic sensors remain effective under these conditions, but they measure range and bearing while leaving elevation unresolved, creating an ambiguity that prevents individual sonar returns from being localized in three dimensional (3D) space. This complicates the sensor use for 3D scene understanding and precise object detection. We introduce \textbf{uScenes}, a multimodal underwater dataset containing synchronized 3D multibeam sonar point clouds and RGB imagery. The dataset contains 110 scenes and 95,834 synchronized observation, representing 277.6 minutes of data collected across multiple field sessions. uScenes establishes a foundation for underwater sensor fusion, cross modal representation learning and 3D scene understanding. Code and datasets are given at https://github.com/era-research-lab/uScenes.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, USA · SINTEF, Trondheim, Norway · Department of Marine Technology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway
National Key Laboratory of Autonomous Marine Vehicle Technology, Harbin Engineering University · Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering, Hong Kong Polytechnic University