The paper presents a method that leverages sparse expert point annotations from historical benthic surveys to improve dense segmentation of marine imagery. By using these points as visual prompts for the SAM2 foundation model and introducing a mechanism to filter out unreliable points, the authors generate high‑quality pseudo‑ground‑truth masks that train more accurate fine‑grained semantic segmentation models. The approach is validated on public benthic datasets and a new benchmark featuring real‑world sparse annotations, aiming to enable scalable ecological analysis.
By Cesar Borja, Breck A. McCollum, Jarret E. Byrnes, Kenneth Sebens, Ana C. Murillo
arXiv:2607. 24064v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in visual understanding, driven by the growing availability of high-quality image-text pairs.
By Tuan-An To, Yuk-Kwan Wong, Tuan-Anh Vu, Ziqiang Zheng, Sai-Kit Yeung
arXiv:2606. 27667v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence is transforming biodiversity monitoring by enabling automated analysis of ecological imagery collected from camera traps, drones, satellites, underwater platforms, and other sensing systems.
By Brinnae Bent, Holly R. Houliston, Jiayi Zhou, G\"unel Aghakishiyeva, David W. Johnston
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:2608.24594v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Submerged kelp forests are vital coastal ecosystems that support marine biodiversity and ecosystem dynamics, yet accurate underwater kelp segmentation...
By Sundarabalan Balasubramanian, C\'esar Borja, Ana C. Murillo, Lexi N. Wilkes, Meredith L. McPherson, Kira A. Krumhansl, Jennifer A. Dijkstra, Jarrett E. K. Byrnes
arXiv:2608.29852v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Automated maritime surveillance from satellite and aerial imagery requires large, precisely annotated datasets, which remain scarce for the instance-se...
By Amir Abbes, Ines Harrabi, Lucas Justin Yirepoa Kinda, Rim Trabelsi, Adnane Cabani, Fatma Abdelkefi