Self-Supervised Compression and Artifact Correction for Streaming Underwater Imaging Sonar

TL;DR

SCOPE is a self-supervised framework that significantly reduces bandwidth and corrects artifacts in real-time underwater sonar imaging, enabling efficient and reliable monitoring in challenging environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel self-supervised approach combining adaptive compression and frequency-aware segmentation tailored for sonar, without needing clean-noise pairs or synthetic data.

Findings

Achieves 40% SSIM improvement over prior methods.

Reduces uplink bandwidth by over 80%.

Operates in real time with low latency.

Abstract

Real-time imaging sonar is crucial for underwater monitoring where optical sensing fails, but its use is limited by low uplink bandwidth and severe sonar-specific artifacts (speckle, motion blur, reverberation, acoustic shadows) affecting up to 98% of frames. We present SCOPE, a self-supervised framework that jointly performs compression and artifact correction without clean-noise pairs or synthetic assumptions. SCOPE combines (i) Adaptive Codebook Compression (ACC), which learns frequency-encoded latent representations tailored to sonar, with (ii) Frequency-Aware Multiscale Segmentation (FAMS), which decomposes frames into low-frequency structure and sparse high-frequency dynamics while suppressing rapidly fluctuating artifacts. A hedging training strategy further guides frequency-aware learning using low-pass proxy pairs generated without labels. Evaluated on months of in-situ ARIS sonar data, SCOPE achieves a structural similarity index (SSIM) of 0.77, representing a 40% improvement over prior self-supervised denoising baselines, at bitrates down to <= 0.0118 bpp. It reduces uplink bandwidth by more than 80% while improving downstream detection. The system runs in real time, with 3.1 ms encoding on an embedded GPU and 97 ms full multi-layer decoding on the server end. SCOPE has been deployed for months in three Pacific Northwest rivers to support real-time salmon enumeration and environmental monitoring in the wild. Results demonstrate that learning frequency-structured latents enables practical, low-bitrate sonar streaming with preserved signal details under real-world deployment conditions.