The Marine Debris Dataset for Forward-Looking Sonar Semantic Segmentation

Accurate detection and segmentation of marine debris is important for keeping the water bodies clean. This paper presents a novel dataset for marine debris segmentation collected using a Forward Looking Sonar (FLS). The dataset consists of 1868 FLS images captured using ARIS Explorer 3000 sensor. The objects used to produce this dataset contain typical house-hold marine debris and distractor marine objects (tires, hooks, valves,etc), divided in 11 classes plus a background class. Performance of state of the art semantic segmentation architectures with a variety of encoders have been analyzed on this dataset and presented as baseline results. Since the images are grayscale, no pre-trained weights have been used. Comparisons are made using Intersection over Union (IoU). The best performing model is Unet with ResNet34 backbone at 0.7481 mIoU.