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.
By Jonathan Sauder, Thomas Ruckli, Gabriel\.e Strodomskyt\.e, Ibrahim Souleiman Abdallah, Rahma Hassan Abdi, Djama Goumaneh Awaleh, Mohamed Houssein Farah, Moustapha Nour, Osama Sharhubil Saad, Mustafa Mohammed Khalafallah Altaib, Maysoon Kteifan, Farah Alsoqi, Eyad Zgool, Jafar Al-Omari, Temesgen Gebremeskel Gebreluel, Zekaria Zekeria Abdulkerim, Meron Ghirmay, Teklehaimanot Beraki, Devis Tuia, Guilhem Banc-Prandi
arXiv:2608. 15790v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Crevasse mapping from uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery matters for glaciological research and for field safety in glaciated terrain.
By Steven Wallace, William D Harcourt, Richard Hann, Aiden Durrant, Somayajulu Sripada, Georgios Leontidis
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
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:2608. 07018v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Horizon detection in images of ice-covered waters is a challenging problem for maritime navigation due to low contrast between water and sky, cluttered ice structures, and varying illumination conditions.
By Alisa Pesotskaia, Emin Zerman
arXiv:2608. 09360v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The demand for maritime surveillance has given rise to the need for monitoring fishing vessel activities, particularly in addressing the challenge of "dark vessels" that operate without Automatic Identification System (AIS) transmission.
By Shantakar Mohanty, Prasun Kumar Gupta, Raian Vargas Maretto
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
The paper introduces a densely labeled coastal dataset of over 1,000 images from Oahu, Hawaii, featuring 18 semantic classes and 7,400 annotated instances. Seven modern vision‑language models were evaluated using text‑to‑mask, mask‑to‑mask, and mask‑to‑text alignment experiments. Results show that broad landscape classes are recognized more accurately than conventional object and coastal classes, with coastal concepts posing the greatest challenge; however, performance differences are not solely due to environmental context, and alternative textual labels improve recognition of several coastal concepts.
By Seth Knoop, Chad R. Samuelson, Gabriel R. Slade, Brady Moon, Joshua G. Mangelson
arXiv:2607. 02718v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in large-scale image generative models enable photorealistic scene synthesis with controllable attributes.
By Stanislav Panev, Minhyek Jeon, Vaishnavi Khindkar, Ahish Deshpande, Celso M de Melo, Shuowen Hu, Shayok Chakraborty, Fernando De la Torre
arXiv:2606.10468v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Coastline detection in remotely sensed imagery is commonly formulated as pixel-wise segmentation, even though coastlines used in coastal monitoring...
By Rafia Malik, Bernhard Pfahringer, Karin Bryan, Mark Dickson, Eibe Frank
arXiv:2601. 17039v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mangroves are critical for climate-change mitigation, requiring reliable monitoring for effective conservation.
By Junhyuk Heo, Beomkyu Choi, Hyunjin Shin, Darongsae Kwon
The paper introduces BalSAM, a model that combines the Segment Anything Model (SAM) with Digital Surface Model (DSM) elevation data to improve tree crown instance segmentation from high‑resolution drone imagery. Experiments across boreal plantations, temperate forests, and tropical forests show that while off‑the‑shelf SAM does not beat a custom Mask R-CNN, fine‑tuning SAM end‑to‑end and incorporating DSM information yield promising results, especially for plantation sites.
By M\'elisande Teng, Arthur Ouaknine, Etienne Lalibert\'e, Yoshua Bengio, David Rolnick, Hugo Larochelle