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
The paper introduces CFC26, an expanded fish‑counting dataset and evaluation framework designed to mimic real‑world sonar deployment scenarios. It extends the earlier CFC22 dataset to eleven locations across nine Pacific salmon rivers, adding new metrics (nMNE and nMANE) that align with expert workflows and uncover biases not seen with frame‑level detection. The authors demonstrate that these metrics reveal directional counting errors that could have ecological consequences.
By Madison Van Horn, Suzanne Stathatos, Sevan Brodjian, Justin Kay, Kai Van Brunt, Erik Young, Sara Beery, Pietro Perona, Michael Hobley
arXiv:2608.21281v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Recent advances in field technology have led to a massive influx of in-the-wild video data for ecological science. The primary bottleneck in leveraging...
By Abigail G. Grassick, Jerome Tze-Hou Hsu, Ethan Lin, Ziang Liu, Max Whitton, Madelyn Hair, Liam Gutierrez, Haozheng Yu, Kristin Branson, Vivek Jayaraman, Michael A. Gil, Andrew M. Hein, Jennifer J. Sun
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
The paper introduces Molmo2Fish, an interactive tool that uses a multimodal large language model to correct imperfect fish tracking predictions in sonar datasets. It demonstrates that the system can effectively improve multi‑object tracking performance through natural language guidance, though further enhancements are needed. The authors provide open‑source code and data for replication.
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...
By Taqi Hamoda, Nuno Gracias