Learning Which Side to Scan: Multi-View Informed Active Perception with Side Scan Sonar for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Autonomous underwater vehicles often perform surveys that capture multiple views of targets in order to provide more information for human operators or automatic target recognition algorithms. In this work, we address the problem of choosing the most informative views that minimize survey time while maximizing classifier accuracy. We introduce a novel active perception framework for multi-view adaptive surveying and reacquisition using side scan sonar imagery. Our framework addresses this challenge by using a graph formulation for the adaptive survey task. We then use Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to both classify acquired sonar views and to choose the next best view based on the collected data. We evaluate our method using simulated surveys in a high-fidelity side scan sonar simulator. Our results demonstrate that our approach is able to surpass the state-of-the-art in classification accuracy and survey efficiency. This framework is a promising approach for more efficient autonomous missions involving side scan sonar, such as underwater exploration, marine archaeology, and environmental monitoring.

Machine Learning for Shipwreck Segmentation from Side Scan Sonar Imagery: Dataset and Benchmark

Open-source benchmark datasets have been a critical component for advancing machine learning for robot perception in terrestrial applications. Benchmark datasets enable the widespread development of state-of-the-art machine learning methods, which require large datasets for training, validation, and thorough comparison to competing approaches. Underwater environments impose several operational challenges that hinder efforts to collect large benchmark datasets for marine robot perception. Furthermore, a low abundance of targets of interest relative to the size of the search space leads to increased time and cost required to collect useful datasets for a specific task. As a result, there is limited availability of labeled benchmark datasets for underwater applications. We present the AI4Shipwrecks dataset, which consists of 24 distinct shipwreck sites totaling 286 high-resolution labeled side scan sonar images to advance the state-of-the-art in autonomous sonar image understanding. We leverage the unique abundance of targets in Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in Lake Huron, MI, to collect and compile a sonar imagery benchmark dataset through surveys with an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). We consulted with expert marine archaeologists for the labeling of robotically gathered data. We then leverage this dataset to perform benchmark experiments for comparison of state-of-the-art supervised segmentation methods, and we present insights on opportunities and open challenges for the field. The dataset and benchmarking tools will be released as an open-source benchmark dataset to spur innovation in machine learning for Great Lakes and ocean exploration. The dataset and accompanying software are available at https://umfieldrobotics.github.io/ai4shipwrecks/.