arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 16

BenthiCat: An opti-acoustic dataset for advancing benthic classification and habitat mapping

arXiv:2510. 04876v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Benthic habitat mapping is fundamental for understanding marine ecosystems, guiding conservation efforts, and supporting sustainable resource management.

By Hayat Rajani, Valerio Franchi, Borja Martinez-Clavel Valles, Raimon Ramos, Rafael Garcia, Nuno Gracias
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