# USIS16K: High-Quality Dataset for Underwater Salient Instance Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19472 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19472/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Cascade R-CNN: Delving into High Quality Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00726/) (2017)
- [Bridging the Gap Between Anchor-based and Anchor-free Detection via Adaptive Training Sample Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02424/) (2019)
- [Hybrid Task Cascade for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07518/) (2019)
- [YOLACT: Real-time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02689/) (2019)
- [PointRend: Image Segmentation as Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08193/) (2019)
- [SOLO: Segmenting Objects by Locations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04488/) (2019)
- [Mask Scoring R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00241/) (2019)
- [Libra R-CNN: Towards Balanced Learning for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02701/) (2019)
- [DetectoRS: Detecting Objects with Recursive Feature Pyramid and Switchable Atrous Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02334/) (2020)
- [The Secrets of Salient Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.2807/) (2014)
- [You Only Look One-level Feature](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09460/) (2021)
- [Dynamic R-CNN: Towards High Quality Object Detection via Dynamic Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06002/) (2020)
- [Semantic Segmentation of Underwater Imagery: Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01241/) (2020)
- [Unseen Object Instance Segmentation for Robotic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08073/) (2020)
- [Sparse Instance Activation for Real-Time Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12827/) (2022)
- [Salient Objects in Clutter: Bringing Salient Object Detection to the Foreground](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06091/) (2018)
- [Instance-Level Salient Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03604/) (2017)
- [SCNet: Training Inference Sample Consistency for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10150/) (2020)
- [Diving into Underwater: Segment Anything Model Guided Underwater Salient Instance Segmentation and A Large-scale Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06039/) (2024)
- [SVAM: Saliency-guided Visual Attention Modeling by Autonomous Underwater Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06252/) (2020)
- [CalibNet: Dual-branch Cross-modal Calibration for RGB-D Salient Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08098/) (2023)
- [Advancing Marine Research: UWSAM Framework and UIIS10K Dataset for Precise Underwater Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15581/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Exploring the Underwater World Segmentation without Extra Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07923/) (2025)
- [MARIS: Marine Open-Vocabulary Instance Segmentation with Geometric Enhancement and Semantic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.15398/) (2025)
- [UWBench: A Comprehensive Vision-Language Benchmark for Underwater Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18262/) (2025)
- [uScenes: A Multimodal RGB and 3D Sonar Dataset for Underwater Robot Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27795/) (2026)
- [USIS-PGM: Photometric Gaussian Mixtures for Underwater Salient Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.13961/) (2026)
- [SPDA-SAM: A Self-prompted Depth-Aware Segment Anything Model for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06335/) (2026)
- [UW-VOS: A Large-Scale Dataset for Underwater Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24006/) (2026)
- [UniV2D: Bridging Visual Restoration and Semantic Perception for Underwater Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07146/) (2026)
- [CoRef-DETR: Decoupled Global Context and Selective Boundary-Category Refinement for Underwater Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08002/) (2026)
- [CoralscapesV2: Panoptic and Fine-Grained Visual Scene Understanding in Coral Reefs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.12826/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Inspired by the biological visual system that selectively allocates attention to efficiently identify salient objects or regions, underwater salient instance segmentation (USIS) aims to jointly address the problems of where to look (saliency prediction) and what is there (instance segmentation) in underwater scenarios. However, USIS remains an underexplored challenge due to the inaccessibility and dynamic nature of underwater environments, as well as the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality annotated datasets. In this paper, we introduce USIS16K, a large-scale dataset comprising 16,151 high-resolution underwater images collected from diverse environmental settings and covering 158 categories of underwater objects. Each image is annotated with high-quality instance-level salient object masks, representing a significant advance in terms of diversity, complexity, and scalability. Furthermore, we provide benchmark evaluations on underwater object detection and USIS tasks using USIS16K. To facilitate future research in this domain, the dataset and benchmark models are publicly available.