# Target Detection and Segmentation in Circular-Scan Synthetic-Aperture-Sonar Images using Semi-Supervised Convolutional Encoder-Decoders

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.03603 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03603/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 57 of its 172 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jan 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Learning Deep Features for Discriminative Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.04150/) (2015)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [FlowNet: Learning Optical Flow with Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.06852/) (2015)
- [Dual Attention Network for Scene Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02983/) (2018)
- [Generalized Cross Entropy Loss for Training Deep Neural Networks with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07836/) (2018)
- [FlowNet 2.0: Evolution of Optical Flow Estimation with Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01925/) (2016)
- [Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.4729/) (2014)
- [Train faster, generalize better: Stability of stochastic gradient descent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.01240/) (2015)
- [R-FCN: Object Detection via Region-based Fully Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06409/) (2016)
- [Understanding Deep Image Representations by Inverting Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.0035/) (2014)
- [Learning Deconvolution Network for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04366/) (2015)
- [How Does Batch Normalization Help Optimization?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11604/) (2018)
- [A Probabilistic U-Net for Segmentation of Ambiguous Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.05034/) (2018)
- [EGNet:Edge Guidance Network for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.08297/) (2019)
- [OverFeat: Integrated Recognition, Localization and Detection using Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6229/) (2013)
- [Object Region Mining with Adversarial Erasing: A Simple Classification to Semantic Segmentation Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08448/) (2017)
- [The Secrets of Salient Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2807/) (2014)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [External-Memory Networks for Low-Shot Learning of Targets in Forward-Looking-Sonar Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10504/) (2021)
- [A Comparison of Data Augmentation Methods for Training Deep Neural Networks on Synthetic Aperture Sonar](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23770/) (2026)
- [LoRA Enhanced Contrastive Learning with SAS Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21061/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a framework for saliency-based, multi-target detection and segmentation of circular-scan, synthetic-aperture-sonar (CSAS) imagery. Our framework relies on a multi-branch, convolutional encoder-decoder network (MB-CEDN). The encoder portion of the MB-CEDN extracts visual contrast features from CSAS images. These features are fed into dual decoders that perform pixel-level segmentation to mask targets. Each decoder provides different perspectives as to what constitutes a salient target. These opinions are aggregated and cascaded into a deep-parsing network to refine the segmentation. We evaluate our framework using real-world CSAS imagery consisting of five broad target classes. We compare against existing approaches from the computer-vision literature. We show that our framework outperforms supervised, deep-saliency networks designed for natural imagery. It greatly outperforms unsupervised saliency approaches developed for natural imagery. This illustrates that natural-image-based models may need to be altered to be effective for this imaging-sonar modality.