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AquaBEV: Monocular Underwater BEV Occupancy with 3D Sonar Supervision

Summary

This paper introduces AquaBEV, a monocular underwater occupancy model that predicts local bird's-eye-view occupancy from a single underwater RGB image, using paired 3D imaging sonar as geometric supervision during training. It maps visual features into a calibration-free polar representation and applies causal decoding along the range dimension, achieving 31.4 Visible IoU and 38.6 Observed IoU—4.0% and 4.3% relative improvements over the strongest transferred baseline.

SourcearXiv RoboticsAuthor: Trung Tien Dong, Shengji Jin, Chen Chen, Yi Sheng, Xiaomin Lin
AquaBEV: Monocular Underwater BEV Occupancy with 3D Sonar Supervision
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[Submitted on 3 Sep 2026]

Title:AquaBEV: Monocular Underwater BEV Occupancy with 3D Sonar Supervision

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Abstract:Autonomous underwater robots are widely used for exploration, monitoring, and inspection, where safe navigation depends on understanding the surrounding free and occupied space. Bird's eye view (BEV) occupancy provides such a representation, but predicting it from a single underwater RGB image is difficult due to limited, unreliable geometric cues from appearance alone. 3D imaging sonar offers complementary geometric measurements to supervise this task.

We introduce AquaBEV, a monocular underwater occupancy model that predicts local BEV occupancy from a single RGB image, using paired 3D imaging sonar as geometric supervision during training. AquaBEV maps visual features into a calibration free polar representation and applies causal decoding along the range dimension before reconstructing the prediction in Cartesian BEV coordinates. A controlled underwater occupancy benchmark was established, adapting representative occupancy methods to the same RGB to sonar task under a unified protocol. AquaBEV achieves 31.4 Visible IoU and 38.6 Observed IoU, 4.0% and 4.3% relative improvements over the strongest transferred baseline.

Subjects:

Robotics (cs.RO); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

Cite as: arXiv:2609.04411 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.04411v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.04411

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Trung Tien Dong [view email] [v1] Thu, 3 Sep 2026 19:22:21 UTC (479 KB)

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Key points and analysis

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Key points

  • AquaBEV predicts local bird's-eye-view occupancy from a single underwater RGB image, avoiding unreliable geometric cues from appearance alone.
  • Paired 3D imaging sonar provides geometric supervision during training, and a calibration-free polar representation handles camera geometry.
  • The model achieves 31.4 Visible IoU and 38.6 Observed IoU, surpassing the strongest transferred baseline by 4.0% and 4.3% relative.

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