arXiv Machine Learning By C. J. Moore, Gregory D. Vetaw, Jordan Malof

A Comparison of Data Augmentation Methods for Training Deep Neural Networks on Synthetic Aperture Sonar

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

arXiv:2607. 23770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work we study Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) for Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) data with a focus on deep neural networks (DNNs).

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Machine Learning.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 3

Improved Automatic Target Recognition in Synthetic Aperture Sonar Imagery Using Large Deep Neural Networks

The paper investigates Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) in Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) imagery, comparing modern convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transformer-based deep neural networks (DNNs). It examines how factors such as network size, architecture, pretraining methods, data augmentation, and regularization influence performance, aiming to identify the highest-performing model and provide a training roadmap for state‑of‑the‑art SAS‑ATR systems.

By C. J. Moore, Alex Hurt, Jordan Malof
arXiv AI
Sep 21

LoRA Enhanced Contrastive Learning with SAS Vision Transformers

The paper presents a three‑stage, parameter‑efficient approach to improve automatic target recognition (ATR) with synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) data by adapting DINOv3 Vision Transformers. Stage 1 applies Low‑Rank Adaptation (LoRA) while freezing the backbone, which significantly boosts the area under the precision‑recall curve from 0.300 to 0.679. Subsequent hard‑negative mining and supervised contrastive learning stages show negligible impact, indicating that a single LoRA adaptation is sufficient for effective underwater ATR.

By Dan Zimmerman, Frank E. Bobe III, Amelia L. McCormack, Matthew Cook, Gregory D. Vetaw
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Beyond Pixel Similarity: Task-Aware Evaluation of GAN-Based Synthetic Sonar Data for Robotic Perception

The paper examines whether standard image‑fidelity metrics (SSIM, PSNR, MSE) accurately reflect the performance of GAN‑generated synthetic sonar data in robotic perception tasks. Using a Pix2Pix GAN with four discriminator configurations (PixelGAN, PatchGAN‑16, PatchGAN‑70, ImageGAN), the authors train object detectors (YOLOX‑S, YOLOX‑L, Faster R‑CNN) solely on real sonar images and evaluate them on the synthetic outputs. Results show a mismatch: the discriminator that yields the best pixel‑level scores does not always produce the best detection performance, with PatchGAN models achieving strong downstream results despite lower SSIM/PSNR/MSE values.

By Hannan Ejaz Keen, Muhammad Moazam Fraz, Karsten Berns