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.
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.
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...
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:2510. 04876v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Benthic habitat mapping is fundamental for understanding marine ecosystems, guiding conservation efforts, and supporting sustainable resource management.
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.
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...
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:2607. 10299v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in large-scale multimodal models have drivenremarkable progress in vision-language tasks; however, comprehensiveomni-modal understanding remains under-explored, largely due to thescarcity of datasets with rich, explicitly aligned auditory cues.
arXiv:2606. 02341v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Underwater acoustic classification has a wide array of oceanic applications, but faces challenges due to an increasingly complex acoustic environment.
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...
arXiv:2606. 07643v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in Omni-Multimodal Large Language Models (Omni-MLLMs) have enabled strong integration of vision, audio, and language.
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.