AquaSAM: Underwater Image Foreground Segmentation

Abstract: The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has revolutionized natural image segmentation, nevertheless, its performance on underwater images is still restricted. This work presents AquaSAM, the first attempt to extend the success of SAM on underwater images with the purpose of creating a versatile method for the segmentation of various underwater targets. To achieve this, we begin by classifying and extracting various labels automatically in SUIM dataset. Subsequently, we develop a straightforward fine-tuning method to adapt SAM to general foreground underwater image segmentation. Through extensive experiments involving eight segmentation tasks like human divers, we demonstrate that AquaSAM outperforms the default SAM model especially at hard tasks like coral reefs. AquaSAM achieves an average Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 7.13 (%) improvement and an average of 8.27 (%) on mIoU improvement in underwater segmentation tasks.