An Underwater Image Semantic Segmentation Method Focusing on Boundaries and a Real Underwater Scene Semantic Segmentation Dataset

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new underwater semantic segmentation dataset and a semi-supervised network that enhances boundary detection, significantly improving segmentation accuracy for underwater objects in real scenes.

Contribution

The paper presents the first underwater semantic segmentation dataset with detailed annotations and a novel boundary-focused semi-supervised segmentation network.

Findings

Improved segmentation accuracy by 6.7% on key categories.

Achieved state-of-the-art results on the DUT-USEG dataset.

Released the first comprehensive underwater segmentation dataset.

Abstract

With the development of underwater object grabbing technology, underwater object recognition and segmentation of high accuracy has become a challenge. The existing underwater object detection technology can only give the general position of an object, unable to give more detailed information such as the outline of the object, which seriously affects the grabbing efficiency. To address this problem, we label and establish the first underwater semantic segmentation dataset of real scene(DUT-USEG:DUT Underwater Segmentation Dataset). The DUT- USEG dataset includes 6617 images, 1487 of which have semantic segmentation and instance segmentation annotations, and the remaining 5130 images have object detection box annotations. Based on this dataset, we propose a semi-supervised underwater semantic segmentation network focusing on the boundaries(US-Net: Underwater Segmentation Network). By designing a pseudo label generator and a boundary detection subnetwork, this network realizes the fine learning of boundaries between underwater objects and background, and improves the segmentation effect of boundary areas. Experiments show that the proposed method improves by 6.7% in three categories of holothurian, echinus, starfish in DUT-USEG dataset, and achieves state-of-the-art results. The DUT- USEG dataset will be released at https://github.com/baxiyi/DUT-USEG.