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.
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...
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.
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: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...
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.
arXiv:2608.23215v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated perception in side-scan sonar (SSS) imagery is severely hindered by physical acoustic artifacts, resulting in representations that inextric...
arXiv:2608.23173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer vision applications for 3D scene understanding in underwater environments remain challenging due to the lack of high-quality 3D data and the i...
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.
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.
arXiv:2608. 19710v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable underwater robotic perception remains difficult because optical imagery degrades under turbidity, wavelength-dependent attenuation, low illumination, scattering, and blur.
Multi-modality data from different sensors provides rich complementary information for 3D perception, becoming an essential component in reliable autonomous driving systems. Current research typically designs intricate and complex fusion strategies to integrate information from multimodal data on a unified bird's-eye-view (BEV) feature map for the joint learning of multiple perception tasks.
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.