Semantic Segmentation of Underwater Images with CNN Based Adaptive Thresholding

Abstract

Semantic segmentation remains a key research field in modern day computer vision and has been used in a myriad of applications across various fields. It can be extremely beneficial in the study of underwater scenes. Various underwater applications, like unmanned explorations and autonomous underwater vehicles, require accurate object classification and detection to allow the probes to avoid malicious objects. However, the models which work well for terrestrial images rarely work just as well for underwater images. This is because underwater images suffer from high blue light intensity as well as other ill-effects such as poor lighting and contrast. Trying to improve the model to account for bad image quality is not a great method as the model may misidentify noise as an image characteristic. In this paper, a unique CNN-based approach for post-processing image thresholding is proposed, on top of 3 models used for the semantic segmentation itself–Segnet, U-Net, and Deeplabv3+. The models’ outputs are then subject to the CNN-based post-processing technique to binarize the outputs into masks, and provides improved segmentation results compared to the base models. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2025.