# UW-VOS: A Large-Scale Dataset for Underwater Video Object Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.24006 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24006/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [The 2017 DAVIS Challenge on Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00675/) (2017)
- [XMem: Long-Term Video Object Segmentation with an Atkinson-Shiffrin Memory Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07115/) (2022)
- [Video Object Segmentation using Space-Time Memory Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00607/) (2019)
- [LaSOT: A High-quality Benchmark for Large-scale Single Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07845/) (2018)
- [Hiera: A Hierarchical Vision Transformer without the Bells-and-Whistles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00989/) (2023)
- [One-Shot Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05198/) (2016)
- [MOSE: A New Dataset for Video Object Segmentation in Complex Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.01872/) (2023)
- [YouTube-VOS: Sequence-to-Sequence Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00461/) (2018)
- [Associating Objects with Transformers for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02638/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Space-Time Networks with Improved Memory Coverage for Efficient Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.05210/) (2021)
- [Tracking Anything with Decoupled Video Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03903/) (2023)
- [Putting the Object Back into Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12982/) (2023)
- [FEELVOS: Fast End-to-End Embedding Learning for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09513/) (2019)
- [Learning Video Object Segmentation from Static Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02646/) (2016)
- [Decoupling Features in Hierarchical Propagation for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09782/) (2022)
- [Collaborative Video Object Segmentation by Foreground-Background Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08333/) (2020)
- [ODTrack: Online Dense Temporal Token Learning for Visual Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01686/) (2024)
- [Online Adaptation of Convolutional Neural Networks for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.09364/) (2017)
- [VITA: Video Instance Segmentation via Object Token Association](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04403/) (2022)
- [RVOS: End-to-End Recurrent Network for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.05612/) (2019)
- [PReMVOS: Proposal-generation, Refinement and Merging for Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09190/) (2018)
- [Collaborative Video Object Segmentation by Multi-Scale Foreground-Background Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06349/) (2020)
- [LVOS: A Benchmark for Long-term Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10181/) (2022)
- [Autoregressive Queries for Adaptive Tracking with Spatio-TemporalTransformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10574/) (2024)
- [Contrastive Semi-supervised Learning for Underwater Image Restoration via Reliable Bank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09101/) (2023)
- [Tracking Meets LoRA: Faster Training, Larger Model, Stronger Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05231/) (2024)
- [SwiftNet: Real-time Video Object Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04604/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Underwater Video Object Segmentation (VOS) is essential for marine exploration, yet open-air methods suffer significant degradation due to color distortion, low contrast, and prevalent camouflage. A primary hurdle is the lack of high-quality training data. To bridge this gap, we introduce UW-VOS, the first large-scale underwater VOS benchmark comprising 1,431 video sequences across 409 categories with 309,295 mask annotations, constructed via a semi-automatic data engine with rigorous human verification. We further propose SAM-U, a parameter-efficient framework that adapts SAM2 to the underwater domain. By inserting lightweight adapters into the image encoder, SAM-U achieves state-of-the-art performance with only ~2% trainable parameters. Extensive experiments reveal that existing methods experience an average 13-point J&F drop on UW-VOS, while SAM-U effectively bridges this domain gap. Detailed attribute-based analysis further identifies small targets, camouflage, and exit-re-entry as critical bottlenecks, providing a roadmap for future research in robust underwater perception.