AIM 2025 Rip Current Segmentation (RipSeg) Challenge Report

TL;DR

The AIM 2025 RipSeg Challenge aimed to advance automatic rip current segmentation in images using diverse datasets, deep learning, and domain adaptation, with 75 participants and promising results.

Contribution

This report introduces a new benchmark for rip current segmentation, highlighting dataset details, evaluation methods, and insights from the first challenge.

Findings

Deep learning methods achieved top performance.

Domain adaptation improved robustness across diverse conditions.

The challenge attracted 75 participants with 5 valid test submissions.

Abstract

This report presents an overview of the AIM 2025 RipSeg Challenge, a competition designed to advance techniques for automatic rip current segmentation in still images. Rip currents are dangerous, fast-moving flows that pose a major risk to beach safety worldwide, making accurate visual detection an important and underexplored research task. The challenge builds on RipVIS, the largest available rip current dataset, and focuses on single-class instance segmentation, where precise delineation is critical to fully capture the extent of rip currents. The dataset spans diverse locations, rip current types, and camera orientations, providing a realistic and challenging benchmark. In total, $75$ participants registered for this first edition, resulting in $5$ valid test submissions. Teams were evaluated on a composite score combining $F_1$, $F_2$, $AP_{50}$, and $AP_{[50:95]}$, ensuring robust and application-relevant rankings. The top-performing methods leveraged deep learning architectures, domain adaptation techniques, pretrained models, and domain generalization strategies to improve performance under diverse conditions. This report outlines the dataset details, competition framework, evaluation metrics, and final results, providing insights into the current state of rip current segmentation. We conclude with a discussion of key challenges, lessons learned from the submissions, and future directions for expanding RipSeg.