AquaBEV is a monocular underwater occupancy model that predicts local bird’s‑eye‑view (BEV) occupancy from a single RGB image. It uses paired 3D imaging sonar data as geometric supervision during training, mapping visual features into a calibration‑free polar representation and decoding along the range dimension before reconstructing Cartesian BEV coordinates. In a controlled underwater occupancy benchmark, AquaBEV outperforms the strongest transferred baseline with 31.4 % Visible IoU and 38.6 % Observed IoU, achieving 4.0 % and 4.3 % relative improvements respectively.
By Trung Tien Dong, Shengji Jin, Chen Chen, Yi Sheng, Xiaomin Lin
The paper introduces CFC26, an expanded fish‑counting dataset and evaluation framework designed to mimic real‑world sonar deployment scenarios. It extends the earlier CFC22 dataset to eleven locations across nine Pacific salmon rivers, adding new metrics (nMNE and nMANE) that align with expert workflows and uncover biases not seen with frame‑level detection. The authors demonstrate that these metrics reveal directional counting errors that could have ecological consequences.
By Madison Van Horn, Suzanne Stathatos, Sevan Brodjian, Justin Kay, Kai Van Brunt, Erik Young, Sara Beery, Pietro Perona, Michael Hobley
arXiv:2608.21281v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Recent advances in field technology have led to a massive influx of in-the-wild video data for ecological science. The primary bottleneck in leveraging...
By Abigail G. Grassick, Jerome Tze-Hou Hsu, Ethan Lin, Ziang Liu, Max Whitton, Madelyn Hair, Liam Gutierrez, Haozheng Yu, Kristin Branson, Vivek Jayaraman, Michael A. Gil, Andrew M. Hein, Jennifer J. Sun
uScenes is a new multimodal dataset for underwater robot perception that provides synchronized 3D multibeam sonar point clouds and RGB imagery. It comprises 110 scenes with 95,834 observations, totaling 277.6 minutes of data collected during multiple field sessions. The dataset aims to support research in underwater sensor fusion, cross‑modal representation learning, and 3D scene understanding.
By Trung Tien Dong, Zhenqi Wu, Aditya Penumarti, Zi-Hao Zhang, Micaiah Bartlett, Jane Shin, Xiaomin Lin
The paper introduces Molmo2Fish, an interactive tool that uses a multimodal large language model to correct imperfect fish tracking predictions in sonar datasets. It demonstrates that the system can effectively improve multi‑object tracking performance through natural language guidance, though further enhancements are needed. The authors provide open‑source code and data for replication.
arXiv:2608.23479v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Side-Scan Sonar (SSS) is a primary modality for large-scale underwater mapping, yet automated perception and cross-modal alignment are severely bottlen...
By Taqi Hamoda, Nuno Gracias
arXiv:2609.38347v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Quantifying collective fish behavior requires accurate trajectories, yet multi-view 3D tracking remains challenging due to frequent occlusions, visuall...
By Patt Phurtivilai, Zhiyang Dou, Yifan Wu, Kinfung Chu, Yuan Liu, Lei Yang, Wenping Wang, Taku Komura
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:2608.29433v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Sonars generate a significant amount of noise. With the advent of new technology capable of producing full 3D point clouds, the noise is amplified in s...
By Aditya Penumarti, Khanh Dong, Zi-Hao Zhang, Yongkyoon Park, Zhenqi Wu, Trung Dong, Shahriar Negahdaripour, Xiaomin Lin, Jane Shin
arXiv:2508. 04928v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a method to extend foundational monocular depth estimators (FMDEs), trained on perspective images, to fisheye images.
By Rit Gangopadhyay, Jung-Hee Kim, Xien Chen, Patrick Rim, Hyoungseob Park, Alex Wong
SonarLLM is a multimodal large language model that treats sonar as a native perceptual modality, combining a sonar‑specific encoder, physics‑aware feature enhancement, and reliability‑aware hierarchical fusion to align acoustic structure with optical semantics. The authors introduce SonarBench, a benchmark covering recognition, counting, visual question answering, and captioning across sonar‑only, optical‑only, and fusion settings, enabling controlled measurement of cross‑modal complementarity. SonarLLM achieves 72.0% macro accuracy on sonar‑only tasks and 68.7% under fusion, outperforming baselines by significant margins and demonstrating increasing fusion gains as optical visibility degrades.
By Cong Su, longxuan ma, Ling Dong, Guofeng Tang, Weijie Yin, Haohui Chen, Zhengtao Yu
RSFusionDet introduces a new RGB‑Sonar multimodal object detection dataset (RSFusion) and benchmark metrics for underwater imaging. The proposed detector uses a Cross‑Attention Fusion module to align RGB and sonar features and an Object Matching Head with loss to identify identical objects across modalities. On the RSFusion dataset, RSFusionDet achieves 76.4/48.6 AP for RGB/sonar detection and 83.4 F1‑Score for cross‑modal matching, outperforming existing models and improving over the DINO baseline by 0.7/1.4 AP.
By Zhuoyan Liu, Yihan Wang, Bo Wang, Bing Wang, Ye Li