arXiv:2606. 25989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated classification of marine species from underwater imagery is essential for scalable ocean biodiversity monitoring and conservation policy.
By Dan Zimmerman, Dimitris A. Pados, George Sklivanitis
The paper presents a method for generating synthetic plankton images conditioned on taxonomic labels to address the long‑tailed nature of automated plankton imaging datasets. A CLIP encoder is fine‑tuned on a large plankton corpus using a ranked contrastive objective that accommodates deep, ragged taxonomies, and then frozen to guide a parameter‑efficient diffusion transformer. The quality of the synthetic samples is evaluated both for distributional fidelity and for their usefulness in training downstream classifiers.
By Daniela Ivanova, Ozgu Goksu, Nicolas Pugeault
arXiv:2608.21281v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Recent advances in field technology have led to a massive influx of in-the-wild video data for ecological science. The primary bottleneck in leveraging...
By Abigail G. Grassick, Jerome Tze-Hou Hsu, Ethan Lin, Ziang Liu, Max Whitton, Madelyn Hair, Liam Gutierrez, Haozheng Yu, Kristin Branson, Vivek Jayaraman, Michael A. Gil, Andrew M. Hein, Jennifer J. Sun
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
CoralscapesV2 is an expanded dataset for coral reef visual scene understanding, increasing the number of fine‑grained classes from 39 to 95 and adding 65,000 exhaustive fish instance masks. It supports panoptic segmentation by providing high‑quality semantic and instance labels across diverse, unconstrained reef imagery. The dataset serves as a challenging benchmark for modern segmentation models and enables broader applications such as benthic cover mapping and automated fish‑reef interaction analysis.
By Jonathan Sauder, Thomas Ruckli, Gabriel\.e Strodomskyt\.e, Ibrahim Souleiman Abdallah, Rahma Hassan Abdi, Djama Goumaneh Awaleh, Mohamed Houssein Farah, Moustapha Nour, Osama Sharhubil Saad, Mustafa Mohammed Khalafallah Altaib, Maysoon Kteifan, Farah Alsoqi, Eyad Zgool, Jafar Al-Omari, Temesgen Gebremeskel Gebreluel, Zekaria Zekeria Abdulkerim, Meron Ghirmay, Teklehaimanot Beraki, Devis Tuia, Guilhem Banc-Prandi
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