mlsanityData to 13 Oct 2026

Self-supervised Learning for Sonar Image Classification

arXiv 2204.09323 ↗First posted 20 Apr 2022cs.CV cs.LGcited by 12

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Abstract (arXiv)

Self-supervised learning has proved to be a powerful approach to learn image representations without the need of large labeled datasets. For underwater robotics, it is of great interest to design computer vision algorithms to improve perception capabilities such as sonar image classification. Due to the confidential nature of sonar imaging and the difficulty to interpret sonar images, it is challenging to create public large labeled sonar datasets to train supervised learning algorithms. In this work, we investigate the potential of three self-supervised learning methods (RotNet, Denoising Autoencoders, and Jigsaw) to learn high-quality sonar image representation without the need of human labels. We present pre-training and transfer learning results on real-life sonar image datasets. Our results indicate that self-supervised pre-training yields classification performance comparable to supervised pre-training in a few-shot transfer learning setup across all three methods. Code and self-supervised pre-trained models are be available at https://github.com/agrija9/ssl-sonar-images

Key facts. Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 13 Oct 2026). Builds on 33 of its 46 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Apr 2022.

Builds on

33 of 46 references.

References · 33

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21 more
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Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 13 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 1; 2023: 2; 2024: 2; 2025: 5; 2026: 2.

12 papers.

  1. 2022A Dataset with Multibeam Forward-Looking Sonar for Underwater Object Detectioncited by 11
  2. 2025The Marine Debris Forward-Looking Sonar Datasetscited by 4
  3. 2023Self-Supervised Learning for Improved Synthetic Aperture Sonar Target Recognitioncited by 2
  4. 2023Advances in Self-Supervised Learning for Synthetic Aperture Sonar Data Processing, Classification, and Pattern Recognitioncited by 1
  5. 2025A Novel Context-Adaptive Fusion of Shadow and Highlight Regions for Efficient Sonar Image Classificationcited by 1
  6. 2024Synth-SONAR: Sonar Image Synthesis with Enhanced Diversity and Realism via Dual Diffusion Models and GPT Promptingcited by 0
  7. 2024Enhancing Marine Debris Acoustic Monitoring by Optical Flow-Based Motion Vector Analysiscited by 0
  8. 2025Weakly Supervised Object Segmentation by Background Conditional Divergencecited by 0
  9. 2025CURVETE: Curriculum Learning and Progressive Self-supervised Training for Medical Image Classificationcited by 0
  10. 2025MANTA: Physics-Informed Generalized Underwater Object Trackingcited by 0
  11. 2026BenthicDINO: Physics-Informed Self-Distillation for View-Invariant Side-Scan Sonar Representationscited by 0
  12. 2026Geometry-Driven Opti-Acoustic Co-Registration and View-Invariant Reflectivity Mapping for Side-Scan Sonarcited by 0