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Main Authors: Yang, Jinghe, Gong, Mingming, Pu, Ye
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08253
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author Yang, Jinghe
Gong, Mingming
Pu, Ye
author_facet Yang, Jinghe
Gong, Mingming
Pu, Ye
contents Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) play a crucial role in underwater exploration. Vision-based methods offer cost-effective solutions for localization and mapping in the absence of conventional sensors like GPS and LiDAR. However, underwater environments present significant challenges for feature extraction and matching due to image blurring and noise caused by attenuation, scattering, and the interference of \textit{marine snow}. In this paper, we aim to improve the robustness of the feature extraction and matching in the turbid underwater environment using the cross-modal knowledge distillation method that transfers the in-air feature extraction and matching models to underwater settings using synthetic underwater images as the medium. We first propose a novel adaptive GAN-synthesis method to estimate water parameters and underwater noise distribution, to generate environment-specific synthetic underwater images. We then introduce a general knowledge distillation framework compatible with different teacher models. The evaluation of GAN-based synthesis highlights the significance of the new components, i.e. GAN-synthesized noise and forward scattering, in the proposed model. Additionally, VSLAM, as a representative downstream application of feature extraction and matching, is employed on real underwater sequences to validate the effectiveness of the transferred model. Project page: https://github.com/Jinghe-mel/UFEN-GAN.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_08253
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Knowledge Distillation for Underwater Feature Extraction and Matching via GAN-synthesized Images
Yang, Jinghe
Gong, Mingming
Pu, Ye
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) play a crucial role in underwater exploration. Vision-based methods offer cost-effective solutions for localization and mapping in the absence of conventional sensors like GPS and LiDAR. However, underwater environments present significant challenges for feature extraction and matching due to image blurring and noise caused by attenuation, scattering, and the interference of \textit{marine snow}. In this paper, we aim to improve the robustness of the feature extraction and matching in the turbid underwater environment using the cross-modal knowledge distillation method that transfers the in-air feature extraction and matching models to underwater settings using synthetic underwater images as the medium. We first propose a novel adaptive GAN-synthesis method to estimate water parameters and underwater noise distribution, to generate environment-specific synthetic underwater images. We then introduce a general knowledge distillation framework compatible with different teacher models. The evaluation of GAN-based synthesis highlights the significance of the new components, i.e. GAN-synthesized noise and forward scattering, in the proposed model. Additionally, VSLAM, as a representative downstream application of feature extraction and matching, is employed on real underwater sequences to validate the effectiveness of the transferred model. Project page: https://github.com/Jinghe-mel/UFEN-GAN.
title Knowledge Distillation for Underwater Feature Extraction and Matching via GAN-synthesized Images
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08253