{"ID":2875226,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01878","arxiv_id":"2509.01878","title":"AI-Driven Marine Robotics: Emerging Trends in Underwater Perception and Ecosystem Monitoring","abstract":"Marine ecosystems face increasing pressure due to climate change, driving the need for scalable, AI-powered monitoring solutions to inform effective conservation and restoration efforts. This paper examines the rapid emergence of underwater AI as a major research frontier and analyzes the factors that have transformed marine perception from a niche application into a catalyst for AI innovation. We identify three convergent drivers: i) environmental necessity for ecosystem-scale monitoring, ii) democratization of underwater datasets through citizen science platforms, and iii) researcher migration from saturated terrestrial computer vision domains. Our analysis reveals how unique underwater challenges - turbidity, cryptic species detection, expert annotation bottlenecks, and cross-ecosystem generalization - are driving fundamental advances in weakly supervised learning, open-set recognition, and robust perception under degraded conditions. We survey emerging trends in datasets, scene understanding and 3D reconstruction, highlighting the paradigm shift from passive observation toward AI-driven, targeted intervention capabilities. The paper demonstrates how underwater constraints are pushing the boundaries of foundation models, self-supervised learning, and perception, with methodological innovations that extend far beyond marine applications to benefit general computer vision, robotics, and environmental monitoring.","short_abstract":"Marine ecosystems face increasing pressure due to climate change, driving the need for scalable, AI-powered monitoring solutions to inform effective conservation and restoration efforts. This paper examines the rapid emergence of underwater AI as a major research frontier and analyzes the factors that have transformed...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01878","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.01878v2","authors":"[\"Scarlett Raine\",\"Tobias Fischer\"]","published":"2025-09-02T01:51:31Z","proceeding":"cs.RO","tasks":"[\"cs.RO\",\"cs.CV\",\"cs.LG\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}