BenthicDINO: Physics-Informed Self-Distillation for View-Invariant Side-Scan Sonar Representations

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23215v1
• Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2026 13:11:22 GMT
• Title: BenthicDINO: Physics-Informed Self-Distillation for View-Invariant Side-Scan Sonar Representations
• Abstract summary: We introduce a physics-informed self-distillation framework built upon the DINOv3 architecture utilizing a ConvNeXt-v2-Tiny backbone to maximize data efficiency.<n>We propose a dense, hierarchical feature fusion strategy across all four network stages to preserve fine-grained sediment details alongside deep semantic abstractions.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Automated perception in side-scan sonar (SSS) imagery is severely hindered by physical acoustic artifacts, resulting in representations that inextricably mix intrinsic seabed reflectivity with transient viewing geometries. Existing self-supervised learning (SSL) frameworks rely on augmentations designed for natural images, failing to account for acoustic degradation and explicitly enforce view-invariance. To address this gap, we introduce a physics-informed self-distillation framework built upon the DINOv3 architecture utilizing a ConvNeXt-v2-Tiny backbone to maximize data efficiency. The proposed methodology enforces view-invariance through two primary mechanisms: physically motivated augmentations that simulate speckle noise, range-dependent attenuation, and radiometric miscalibration; and a Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) penalty that explicitly decouples learned dense patch features from physical viewing parameters. Furthermore, we propose a dense, hierarchical feature fusion strategy across all four network stages to preserve fine-grained sediment details alongside deep semantic abstractions. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that the framework natively groups complex benthic topographies into stable, noise-free semantic clusters without relying on manual annotations. During supervised downstream tasks on the S3Seg dataset, the fused representations exhibited exceptional data efficiency, achieving 96% of its absolute peak performance using only 10% of the available annotated data, ultimately reaching a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 71.4% and an overall accuracy of 86.5%.

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