arXiv AI By Taqi Hamoda, Hayat Rajani, Nuno Gracias

BenthicDINO: Physics-Informed Self-Distillation for View-Invariant Side-Scan Sonar Representations

Read the original on arXiv AI →

The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.

arXiv Machine Learning
3d ago

Weakly Supervised Seafloor Segmentation for Seagrass Habitat Mapping in Side-Scan Sonar Imagery

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
arXiv AI
3d ago

SonarLLM: A Native Sonar--Optical Multimodal Large Language Model for Underwater Perception

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