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
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
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.
By Mohammad Arif Ul Alam
arXiv:2605.24928v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Sonar imaging is the primary modality for underwater target detection, yet small targets remain difficult to detect due to insufficient pixel cover...
By Hui Lin, Jiayi Li, Jing Wang, Shenghui Rong
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
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
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
Vessel perception from space is crucial for a wide range of maritime applications, from traffic monitoring to environmental protection. However, most existing datasets predominantly focus on general o...
arXiv:2609.37003v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vessel perception from space is crucial for a wide range of maritime applications, from traffic monitoring to environmental protection. However, most e...
By Danfeng Hong, Chenyu Li, Jocelyn Chanussot
RA‑SOD is a new RGB‑Thermal salient object detection framework that explicitly models the reliability of each modality. It introduces a reliability‑conditioned representation, an uncertainty‑guided dual‑stream refinement, and a pixel‑wise modality competition mechanism to adaptively compensate degraded features and suppress unreliable evidence. Experiments on four benchmarks show that RA‑SOD achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance and remains robust under severe modality degradation.
By Hongbo Gao, Zhengyu Li, Xueru Nie, Dihao Zhu, Lijun Zhao, Yunke Wang, Chang Xu
CoRef-DETR is a compact detection transformer designed for underwater instance segmentation, addressing errors from context, boundaries, and categories. It uses a decoupled global context detector with 33.4 M parameters, a lightweight boundary refiner of 47.7 k parameters, and a crop‑probe category branch that revises up to three mask categories per image. The method achieves state‑of‑the‑art mask AP on multiple UIIS datasets and runs in 26–37 ms on an NVIDIA T4 GPU, outperforming larger models.
By M. Fazri Nizar, Julian Supardi, Muhammad Naufal Rachmatullah
arXiv:2606. 10819v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: RS-MLLMs enable natural-language understanding and spatial reasoning over earth observation imagery.
By Miaoxin Cai, Guanqun Wang, Wei Zhang, Guangyao Zhou, Yin Zhuang, Tong Zhang, Hao Wang, He Chen, Jun Li