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: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:2607. 18013v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper introduces a method for real-time processing and transmission of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) imagery over low-bandwidth communication links.
By Adrian Bodenmann, Cailei Liang, Miquel Massot-Campos, Samuel Simmons, Alexander B. Phillips, Alberto Consensi, Matthew Kingsland, Rashiid Sherif, Stan Brown, Adam Riese, Blair Thornton
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:2608. 14287v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Passive acoustic sensing offers a critical, cost-efficient, and, crucially, passive alternative for detecting small unmanned aerial vehicles.
By Vadym Vilhurin, Volodymyr Sydorskyi, Andrii Shevtsov
arXiv:2601. 08446v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The development of reliable methods for multi-label classification (MLC) has become a prominent research direction in remote sensing (RS).
By Tom Burgert, Julia Henkel, Beg\"um Demir
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
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 examines whether standard image‑fidelity metrics (SSIM, PSNR, MSE) accurately reflect the performance of GAN‑generated synthetic sonar data in robotic perception tasks. Using a Pix2Pix GAN with four discriminator configurations (PixelGAN, PatchGAN‑16, PatchGAN‑70, ImageGAN), the authors train object detectors (YOLOX‑S, YOLOX‑L, Faster R‑CNN) solely on real sonar images and evaluate them on the synthetic outputs. Results show a mismatch: the discriminator that yields the best pixel‑level scores does not always produce the best detection performance, with PatchGAN models achieving strong downstream results despite lower SSIM/PSNR/MSE values.
By Hannan Ejaz Keen, Muhammad Moazam Fraz, Karsten Berns
arXiv:2606. 04008v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Radiated noise in unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) is an important indicator for characterizing acoustic signatures and evaluating platform performance.
By Yan Wu, Yang Yang, Jun Fan, Bin Wang
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
arXiv:2607. 23770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work we study Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) for Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) data with a focus on deep neural networks (DNNs).
By C. J. Moore, Gregory D. Vetaw, Jordan Malof