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
Sep 23

Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Pre-Trained Vision Foundation Models for Active and Passive Seismic Data Denoising

The paper presents a framework that adapts general-purpose Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) to seismic data denoising using Parameter‑Efficient Fine‑Tuning with Low‑Rank Adaptation (LoRA). It introduces a kurtosis‑guided unsupervised test‑time adaptation module that updates only LoRA parameters to self‑calibrate for site‑specific noise without ground truth. Experiments on exploration seismic images and DAS data demonstrate that the approach matches or surpasses domain‑specific models and generalizes well to unseen cross‑site data.

By Jiahua Zhao, Umair bin Waheed, Jing Sun, Yang Cui, Nikos Savva, Eric Verschuur
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 26

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
Aug 26

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