Yuk-Kwan Wong

Yuk-Kwan Wong, Ziqiang Zheng, Mingzhe Zhang et al.

Coral reef imagery offers critical data for monitoring ecosystem health, in particular as the ease of image datasets continues to rapidly expand. Whilst semi-automated analytical platforms for reef imagery are becoming more available, the dominant approaches face fundamental limitations. To address these challenges, we propose CoralSCOP-LAT, a coral reef image analysis and labeling tool that automatically segments and analyzes coral regions. By leveraging advanced machine learning models tailored for coral reef segmentation, CoralSCOP-LAT enables users to generate dense segmentation masks with minimal manual effort, significantly enhancing both the labeling efficiency and precision of coral reef analysis. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that CoralSCOP-LAT surpasses existing coral reef analysis tools in terms of time efficiency, accuracy, precision, and flexibility. CoralSCOP-LAT, therefore, not only accelerates the coral reef annotation process but also assists users in obtaining high-quality coral reef segmentation and analysis outcomes. Github Page: https://github.com/ykwongaq/CoralSCOP-LAT.

Yuk-Kwan Wong, Haixin Liang, Zeyu Ma et al.

Marine visual understanding is essential for monitoring and protecting marine ecosystems, enabling automatic and scalable biological surveys. However, progress is hindered by limited training data and the lack of a systematic task formulation that aligns domain-specific marine challenges with well-defined computer vision tasks, thereby limiting effective model application. To address this gap, we present ORCA, a multi-modal benchmark for marine research comprising 14,647 images from 478 species, with 42,217 bounding box annotations and 22,321 expert-verified instance captions. The dataset provides fine-grained visual and textual annotations that capture morphology-oriented attributes across diverse marine species. To catalyze methodological advances, we evaluate 18 state-of-the-art models on three tasks: object detection (closed-set and open-vocabulary), instance captioning, and visual grounding. Results highlight key challenges, including species diversity, morphological overlap, and specialized domain demands, underscoring the difficulty of marine understanding. ORCA thus establishes a comprehensive benchmark to advance research in marine domain. Project Page: http://orca.hkustvgd.com/.

YuK-Kwan Wong, Tuan-An To, Jipeng Zhang et al.

We have witnessed promising progress led by large language models (LLMs) and further vision language models (VLMs) in handling various queries as a general-purpose assistant. VLMs, as a bridge to connect the visual world and language corpus, receive both visual content and various text-only user instructions to generate corresponding responses. Though great success has been achieved by VLMs in various fields, in this work, we ask whether the existing VLMs can act as domain experts, accurately answering marine questions, which require significant domain expertise and address special domain challenges/requirements. To comprehensively evaluate the effectiveness and explore the boundary of existing VLMs, we construct the first large-scale marine VLM dataset and benchmark called MarineEval, with 2,000 image-based question-answering pairs. During our dataset construction, we ensure the diversity and coverage of the constructed data: 7 task dimensions and 20 capacity dimensions. The domain requirements are specially integrated into the data construction and further verified by the corresponding marine domain experts. We comprehensively benchmark 17 existing VLMs on our MarineEval and also investigate the limitations of existing models in answering marine research questions. The experimental results reveal that existing VLMs cannot effectively answer the domain-specific questions, and there is still a large room for further performance improvements. We hope our new benchmark and observations will facilitate future research. Project Page: http://marineeval.hkustvgd.com/

Quang-Trung Truong, Yuk-Kwan Wong, Vo Hoang Kim Tuyen Dang et al.

Marine videos present significant challenges for video understanding due to the dynamics of marine objects and the surrounding environment, camera motion, and the complexity of underwater scenes. Existing video captioning datasets, typically focused on generic or human-centric domains, often fail to generalize to the complexities of the marine environment and gain insights about marine life. To address these limitations, we propose a two-stage marine object-oriented video captioning pipeline. We introduce a comprehensive video understanding benchmark that leverages the triplets of video, text, and segmentation masks to facilitate visual grounding and captioning, leading to improved marine video understanding and analysis, and marine video generation. Additionally, we highlight the effectiveness of video splitting in order to detect salient object transitions in scene changes, which significantly enrich the semantics of captioning content. Our dataset and code have been released at https://msc.hkustvgd.com.