arXiv Computer Vision

CoralscapesV2: Panoptic and Fine-Grained Visual Scene Understanding in Coral Reefs

CoralscapesV2 is an expanded dataset for coral reef visual scene understanding, increasing the number of fine‑grained classes from 39 to 95 and adding 65,000 exhaustive fish instance masks. It supports panoptic segmentation by providing high‑quality semantic and instance labels across diverse, unconstrained reef imagery. The dataset serves as a challenging benchmark for modern segmentation models and enables broader applications such as benthic cover mapping and automated fish‑reef interaction analysis.

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
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
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 26

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 Computer Vision
Aug 24

WildFin: An In-the-Wild Dataset for Fish Behavioral Recognition

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
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Exploring Efficient Open-Vocabulary Segmentation in the Remote Sensing

The paper introduces OVRSISBench, a unified benchmark for open‑vocabulary remote sensing image segmentation, and evaluates existing OVS/OVRSIS models, uncovering their shortcomings in remote sensing contexts. Leveraging insights from this evaluation, the authors propose RSKT‑Seg, a new framework featuring a Multi‑Directional Cost Map Aggregation module, an Efficient Cost Map Fusion transformer, and a Remote Sensing Knowledge Transfer module. Experiments on the benchmark demonstrate that RSKT‑Seg outperforms strong baselines by +3.8 mIoU and +5.9 mACC while achieving twice the inference speed.

By Bingyu Li, Haocheng Dong, Da Zhang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Junyu Gao, Xuelong Li