arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Leveraging existing sparse point annotations for benthic imagery dense segmentation

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