arXiv AI

LoRA Enhanced Contrastive Learning with SAS Vision Transformers

The paper presents a three‑stage, parameter‑efficient approach to improve automatic target recognition (ATR) with synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) data by adapting DINOv3 Vision Transformers. Stage 1 applies Low‑Rank Adaptation (LoRA) while freezing the backbone, which significantly boosts the area under the precision‑recall curve from 0.300 to 0.679. Subsequent hard‑negative mining and supervised contrastive learning stages show negligible impact, indicating that a single LoRA adaptation is sufficient for effective underwater ATR.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

Improved Automatic Target Recognition in Synthetic Aperture Sonar Imagery Using Large Deep Neural Networks

The paper investigates Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) in Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) imagery, comparing modern convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transformer-based deep neural networks (DNNs). It examines how factors such as network size, architecture, pretraining methods, data augmentation, and regularization influence performance, aiming to identify the highest-performing model and provide a training roadmap for state‑of‑the‑art SAS‑ATR systems.

By C. J. Moore, Alex Hurt, Jordan Malof
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 26

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.

By Hayat Rajani, Nuno Gracias, Rafael Garcia
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 2

Lightweight Adaptation of General-Purpose VLMs for Multispectral and SAR Image Understanding

The paper demonstrates a lightweight method to adapt general-purpose vision‑language models (VLMs) for multispectral and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image understanding. By rendering each observation as five optical views and one SAR view, naming them in the prompt, and applying LoRA to the language network and selected visual transformer blocks, the authors enable VLMs to process band composites, spectral indices, and radar backscatter without retraining a new foundation model. On a balanced six‑class land‑cover benchmark from BigEarthNet‑v2, the adapted Qwen3‑VL achieves a micro F1 score of 0.8275, and the same protocol improves four other VLMs and transfers to flood verification and captioning tasks.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 25

Learning Spatially Adaptive Structural Coordination for Underwater Salient Object Detection

The paper introduces SASC-USOD, a framework for underwater salient object detection that learns spatially adaptive coordination between two structural representations: a boundary-sensitive representation using Laplacian filtering and a region-coherent representation via dual-range anisotropic large-kernel aggregation. A spatial coordination module estimates the relative reliability of these representations and adaptively blends them based on image content. Experiments on USOD10K and USOD benchmarks show that SASC-USOD outperforms existing methods, reducing MAE by 4.07% and 23.53% respectively, and its lightweight variant achieves 21 FPS on an NVIDIA Jetson TX2 NX.

By Lin Hong, Chenhui Wang, Linan Deng, Yuning Cui, Yu Zhang, Xin Wang, Bojian Zhang, Xingchen Yang, Fumin Zhang