SeafloorAI: A Large-scale Vision-Language Dataset for Seafloor Geological Survey

TL;DR

SeafloorAI is a comprehensive, large-scale vision-language dataset for seafloor mapping, designed to advance machine learning in marine science by providing extensive sonar imagery, annotations, and language data.

Contribution

The paper introduces SeafloorAI, the first large-scale, AI-ready dataset for seafloor mapping with integrated language components, created in collaboration with marine scientists.

Findings

Dataset includes 62 surveys covering 17,300 km².

Contains 696K sonar images and 827K segmentation masks.

Features 696K language descriptions and 7M QA pairs.

Abstract

A major obstacle to the advancements of machine learning models in marine science, particularly in sonar imagery analysis, is the scarcity of AI-ready datasets. While there have been efforts to make AI-ready sonar image dataset publicly available, they suffer from limitations in terms of environment setting and scale. To bridge this gap, we introduce SeafloorAI, the first extensive AI-ready datasets for seafloor mapping across 5 geological layers that is curated in collaboration with marine scientists. We further extend the dataset to SeafloorGenAI by incorporating the language component in order to facilitate the development of both vision- and language-capable machine learning models for sonar imagery. The dataset consists of 62 geo-distributed data surveys spanning 17,300 square kilometers, with 696K sonar images, 827K annotated segmentation masks, 696K detailed language descriptions and approximately 7M question-answer pairs. By making our data processing source code publicly available, we aim to engage the marine science community to enrich the data pool and inspire the machine learning community to develop more robust models. This collaborative approach will enhance the capabilities and applications of our datasets within both fields.