# GeoCueFormer: Geometry-Guided Wavelet Representation and Prediction-Cued Dual-Stage Decoder for Underwater Semantic Segmentation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18069 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18069/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Encoder-Decoder with Atrous Separable Convolution for Semantic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.02611/) (2018)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Scene Parsing Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01105/) (2016)
- [Masked-attention Mask Transformer for Universal Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01527/) (2021)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Unified Perceptual Parsing for Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.10221/) (2018)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [K-Net: Towards Unified Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14855/) (2021)
- [Semantic Segmentation of Underwater Imagery: Dataset and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01241/) (2020)
- [Deep Dual-resolution Networks for Real-time and Accurate Semantic Segmentation of Road Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06085/) (2021)
- [Lite Vision Transformer with Enhanced Self-Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10809/) (2021)
- [Interlaced Sparse Self-Attention for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12273/) (2019)
- [Improving underwater semantic segmentation with underwater image quality attention and muti-scale aggregation attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23422/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Second-Order Problem Solving for Recursive Self-Improvement in Formal Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05701/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Underwater semantic segmentation is essential for marine ecosystem monitoring, yet remains challenging due to severe visual degradation. Light absorption and scattering often lead to color shifts, low contrast, and blurred boundaries, making shallow detail features unreliable. Existing underwater segmentation methods improve RGB feature aggregation or boundary prediction, but still lack an explicit mechanism to distinguish structure-related details from degradation-induced responses. To address this limitation, we propose GeoCueFormer, a lightweight framework that combines geometry-constrained frequency enhancement with prediction-cued refinement. GeoCueFormer performs stage-specific wavelet enhancement on hierarchical encoder features to complement shallow boundary details while preserving deep structural semantics. A depth-derived spatial gate constrains shallow frequency enhancement toward geometry-consistent regions, and a prediction-cued dual-stage decoder further refines ambiguous high-resolution features. GeoCueFormer obtains 82.23% and 73.04% mIoU on SUIM and DUT, respectively. Under comparable model complexity and standard benchmark settings on SUIM and DUT, it achieves SOTA performance while maintaining a favorable accuracy-complexity trade-off. These results show that distinguishing structural details from degradation-induced interference is more effective for underwater segmentation.
