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AquaticCLIP: A Vision-Language Foundation Model and Dataset for Underwater Scene Analysis

delete2026-02-09
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PRE
AI
B
Basit Alawode
I
Iyyakutti Iyappan Ganapathi
S
Sajid Javed
M
Mohammed Bennamoun
A
Arif Mahmood
DOI:10.1109/tnnls.2026.3657138delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
The preservation of aquatic biodiversity is critical in mitigating the effects of climate change. Aquatic scene understanding plays a pivotal role in aiding marine scientists in their decision-making processes. In this article, we introduce AquaticCLIP, a novel contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) model tailored for aquatic scene understanding. AquaticCLIP presents an underwater domain-specific learning framework that aligns images and texts in aquatic environments, enabling tasks such as segmentation, classification, detection, and object counting. By leveraging our large-scale underwater image-text paired dataset without the need for ground-truth (GT) annotations, our model enriches existing vision-language models (VLMs) in the aquatic domain. For this purpose, we construct a 2-million underwater image-text paired dataset using heterogeneous resources, including YouTube, Netflix, National Geographic (NatGeo), etc. To fine-tune AquaticCLIP, we propose a prompt-guided vision encoder (PGVE) that progressively aggregates patch features via learnable prompts, while a vision-guided mechanism enhances the language encoder by incorporating visual context. The model is optimized through a contrastive pretraining loss to align visual and textual modalities. AquaticCLIP achieves notable performance improvements in zero-shot settings across multiple underwater computer vision tasks, outperforming existing methods in both accuracy and robustness. Our model sets a new benchmark for vision-language applications in underwater environments. The code and dataset for AquaticCLIP are publicly available on GitHub at: <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/BasitAlawode/AquaticCLIP</uri>
Keywords:
Object counting
object segmentation
underwater object detection
underwater scene analysis
vision language model

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems cover
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
IF:
8.9
Papers:
7.5K
Citations:
7.2W

Organization

K
Khalifa University of Science and Technology
Scholars:
1.2K
Papers: 557
Citations: 4
T
the university of western australia
Scholars:
561
Papers: 280
Citations: 0
Information Technology University cover
Information Technology University
Scholars:
10
Papers: 10
Citations: 635
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