arXiv Machine Learning

Weakly Supervised Seafloor Segmentation for Seagrass Habitat Mapping in Side-Scan Sonar Imagery

The paper presents a weakly supervised semantic segmentation approach for mapping seagrass habitats using side‑scan sonar imagery. By training a ViT‑based encoder‑decoder with image‑level labels, class activation maps are refined into pseudo‑labels and iteratively self‑trained, achieving high mean intersection‑over‑union scores (up to 89.3 %) without pixel‑level annotations. The method also benefits from self‑supervised pretraining and demonstrates generalizability in field trials.

arXiv Computer Vision
3d ago

Comparative Assessment of Deep Learning Architectures for Underwater Subsurface Kelp Forest Segmentation with The Kelp-o-Tron

arXiv:2608.24594v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Submerged kelp forests are vital coastal ecosystems that support marine biodiversity and ecosystem dynamics, yet accurate underwater kelp segmentation...

By Sundarabalan Balasubramanian, C\'esar Borja, Ana C. Murillo, Lexi N. Wilkes, Meredith L. McPherson, Kira A. Krumhansl, Jennifer A. Dijkstra, Jarrett E. K. Byrnes
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Leveraging existing sparse point annotations for benthic imagery dense segmentation

The paper presents a method that leverages sparse expert point annotations from historical benthic surveys to improve dense segmentation of marine imagery. By using these points as visual prompts for the SAM2 foundation model and introducing a mechanism to filter out unreliable points, the authors generate high‑quality pseudo‑ground‑truth masks that train more accurate fine‑grained semantic segmentation models. The approach is validated on public benthic datasets and a new benchmark featuring real‑world sparse annotations, aiming to enable scalable ecological analysis.

By Cesar Borja, Breck A. McCollum, Jarret E. Byrnes, Kenneth Sebens, Ana C. Murillo
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 16

BenthiCat: An opti-acoustic dataset for advancing benthic classification and habitat mapping

arXiv:2510. 04876v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Benthic habitat mapping is fundamental for understanding marine ecosystems, guiding conservation efforts, and supporting sustainable resource management.

By Hayat Rajani, Valerio Franchi, Borja Martinez-Clavel Valles, Raimon Ramos, Rafael Garcia, Nuno Gracias
arXiv Computer Vision
4d ago

WADE: A Reasoning-Annotated Benchmark for Multi-Instance Floating-Waste Grounding with Compact Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2608.22950v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Floating waste in inland waterways threatens aquatic ecosystems and requires timely monitoring under cluttered, multi-object conditions. Existing aquat...

By Md. Asaduzzaman Shuvo, Ahsan Farabi, Md. Abdul Ahad Minhaz, Mahedi Hasan, Israt Khandaker, Ibrahim Khalil Shanto, Muhammad Nomani Kabir
arXiv Computer Vision
1d ago

Detection of Christmas tree plantations from high-resolution aerial imagery. A case study in the French Morvan

The study presents a new approach to detect Christmas tree plantations in high‑resolution aerial imagery, treating the task as a rare‑target semantic segmentation problem. It introduces a Hard Negative Mining strategy that significantly improves precision‑recall performance, achieving an IoU of 0.733 and an F1‑score of 0.846 on a 2020 test set. Temporal transfer experiments demonstrate the model’s ability to generalize across years, while large‑scale validation highlights the challenge posed by the plantations’ small spatial footprint.

By Francesca Razzano, Emanuele Dalsasso, Adrien Baysse-Lain\'e, Silvia Liberata Ullo, Gilda Schirinzi, Jocelyn Chanussot
arXiv AI
Jul 8

EcoVision: AI-Powered Drone Imaging for Salt Marsh Vegetation Monitoring and Dominance Mapping

arXiv:2607. 06105v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-resolution RGB imagery acquired from low-altitude UAV surveys was processed through a modular pipeline incorporating transformer-based semantic segmentation, connected-component vegetation extraction, fine-grained species classification using a ConvNeXt architecture, and grid-based dominance scoring at 2x2m resolution.

By Innocent Onyenonachi, Peter J. Lawerance, Nadia Kanwal