A Survey on Semantic Segmentation Models for Underwater Images

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, such as unmanned explorations and autonomous underwater vehicles, require accurate object classification and detection to allow the probes to avoid malicious objects. However, the models that 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. This can be fixed using preprocessing techniques to manually improve the image characteristics. 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 chapter, 6 different deep learning semantic segmentation models—SegNet, Pyramid Scene Parsing Network (PSP-Net), U-Net, DNN-VGG (Deep Neural Network-VGG), DeepLabv3+, and SUIM-Net—are explored. Their architectures, technical aspects with respect to underwater images, advantages, and disadvantages are all investigated. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.