Challenges, competitions, workshops and resources for maritime vision and robotics.
Selected challenge and competition listings checked 23 October 2026. Follow the organiser links for current rules and registration.
Detect divers as fully oriented 3D boxes in sparse sonar point clouds. The released dataset, official scorer and online submission route are linked from the challenge page.
Restore underwater imagery and segment marine life across public and Jetson hardware evaluation tracks. Check the testing-phase rules and the separate code and method deadline.
Estimate boat-mounted camera trajectories using video, calibration and timestamps. Development data, a public starter, held-out prediction submissions and ranking rules are available.
The fifth MaCVi workshop takes place on 5 January 2027, afternoon in Orlando. Regular paper submissions have closed; challenge entries remain open until 27 October 2026, 23:59 AoE. The workshop covers underwater 3D perception, embedded underwater restoration and segmentation, and maritime visual odometry.
Student teams build autonomous surface vessels for perception, navigation and autonomy tasks. The 2027 competition is scheduled for 18–23 February at Nathan Benderson Park in Sarasota, Florida. Registration is open from 1 October to 1 December 2026.
An international student competition for autonomous underwater vehicles, combining perception, localisation, manipulation and systems engineering. The organisers list the 2027 event for 10–15 August; use the season page for registration, venue and mission updates.
A student competition for autonomous surface vessels in Trondheim, with tasks around manoeuvring, navigation, collision avoidance and docking. Follow the official season page and handbook for confirmed dates, eligibility and registration.
Held on 8 September 2026 in Malmö, Sweden, Marine Vision joined the 7th CVAUI and 4th AAMVEM workshop series. It covered underwater image and video analysis, marine environmental monitoring and collaboration between computer vision researchers and marine scientists.
Held on 1 October 2026, this workshop focused on robust sensing, state estimation, mapping and navigation in marine environments. Topics included vision, sonar and acoustic sensor fusion, SLAM, GPS-denied operations and coral reef monitoring. The website includes the programme and speakers.
The inaugural MaCVi workshop at WACV 2023 focused on computer vision for unmanned aerial and surface vehicles. It organised sub‑challenges on UAV‑based maritime object detection and tracking and USV‑based maritime obstacle segmentation and detection using the SeaDronesSee and MODS benchmarks. The summary report analyses trends from over 130 submissions and introduces the SeaDronesSee Object Detection v2 benchmark.
Held at WACV 2024, the second MaCVi workshop continued the mission to advance maritime vision for UAVs and USVs. Challenge categories included UAV‑based multi‑object tracking with re‑identification, USV‑based obstacle segmentation and detection, and maritime boat tracking. A new embedded subtrack promoted efficient inference on real‑world embedded devices. The report summarises statistical and qualitative trends from over 100 submissions and provides datasets, evaluation code and a leaderboard for public access.
The 3rd MaCVi workshop took place at WACV 2025 in Tucson, Arizona. It combined regular paper sessions, challenge tracks and keynotes on maritime computer vision. Topics spanned object detection and tracking for UAVs and USVs, multi‑modal image fusion, use of hyperspectral and infrared sensors, anomaly detection, activity recognition, segmentation, scene understanding, synthetic data generation, transfer learning, embedded vision algorithms, visual autonomous navigation and collaborative monitoring.
The 4th MaCVi workshop at CVPR 2026 brought together computer vision, robotics and marine science through research papers, keynotes and maritime perception challenges. Its summary provides the workshop recording, challenge results and links to the published papers.
The interdisciplinary maritime robotics field workshop takes place on 18-25 October 2026 in Vodice, Croatia. Lectures, hands-on tutorials and field demonstrations connect researchers and practitioners working on marine robotics, underwater systems and their applications.
The 12th EMRA workshop took place on 23-24 June 2026 in Lisbon, Portugal. It connected EU-funded marine robotics projects with industry, end users and other stakeholders. The website provides presentations from the workshop.
Held on 1-3 September 2026 in Southampton, UK, the biennial symposium covered autonomous underwater and surface vehicles, gliders and field deployments. It offered standard symposium papers and a peer-reviewed IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering track.
The 2025 IEEE MARIS symposium in Syros brought together maritime informatics and robotics, including autonomous systems, perception, AI and data-driven marine applications. Its series website provides event information and links to related activities.
The ICCV 2025 edition joined the 6th CVAUI and 3rd AAMVEM workshops on underwater imagery and marine environmental monitoring. Its archive retains the programme, papers, speakers and nectar posters from that edition.
This IROS 2025 workshop addressed the challenge of transferring marine robotics research from laboratory to field applications. It highlighted the harsh ocean environment and explores themes such as bridging simulation and real‑world deployments, long‑term autonomous operations, risk mitigation, best practices for field testing and sharing failures and lessons learned. The workshop aimed to support collaboration among researchers, engineers and industry stakeholders.
Co‑sponsored by the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society and endorsed by the UN Decade of Ocean Science, this two‑day symposium at Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi explores how AI and robotics can address key challenges in marine ecosystems. It features strategic perspectives from invited speakers and presentations on machine learning and bio‑inspired robotics for real‑time monitoring, energy‑efficient solutions, predictive modelling of marine biodiversity and sustainability issues.
Held on 19-21 May 2026 in Gibraltar, the Marine Imaging Workshop brought together scientists and engineers working on ocean observation. Topics included image capture and processing, AI for marine science, annotation, data management and practical software workflows.
Held on 5-7 October 2026 in Šibenik, Croatia, MetroSea covered instrumentation, sensors, measurement and monitoring for marine applications. Relevant topics included navigation, underwater obstacle detection, underwater acoustics and signal and image processing.
The IROS 2025 OCEANTECH workshop connected marine robotics and marine science through underwater sensing, autonomy, mapping and field applications. Consult the workshop website for its materials and any later edition announcements.
The MBARI-led Ocean Vision AI initiative developed tools and community participation for AI-assisted analysis of ocean imagery. Its current public entry point is FathomNet, connecting an annotated image database, an analysis portal and the FathomVerse community-science app.
Held on 1-3 September 2026 in Sestri Levante, Italy, UComms focused on underwater communications and networking. It connects researchers and practitioners working on acoustic, optical and radio communications, protocols and interoperability for underwater systems.
The CVAUI series covers computer vision for underwater imagery, including enhancement, scene understanding, marine-life monitoring and autonomous navigation. Its 7th edition formed part of the joint Marine Vision workshop at ECCV 2026; CVUEM maintains the workshop history.
A research community for computer vision and image processing in underwater environmental monitoring. Topics include habitat mapping, species identification, biodiversity and animal behaviour. Its website provides workshop information and a link to the community's LinkedIn group.
Expert-annotated ocean imagery and resources for training and evaluating marine computer vision models. FathomNet connects its image database with an analysis portal, published machine learning models and community contributions.
An open-source platform for collaborative image and video annotation, originally built for marine environmental monitoring and exploration. It supports shared label trees, annotation review and AI-assisted workflows for preparing and analysing marine visual datasets.
SeaClear and SeaClear2 are EU research projects developing teams of autonomous surface and underwater robots for marine litter mapping, monitoring, collection and prevention. The projects combine computer vision, AI, sensor fusion and robotic autonomy for cleaner ports, harbours and coastal waters.
