A collection of workshops, challenges and related maritime vision events from our community.
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 195 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 unites computer vision, robotics and marine science to advance perception for unmanned surface and aerial vehicles. It offers technical papers, keynotes and five benchmark challenges, covering topics such as optical object classification and tracking, thermal and multispectral perception, and multimodal RGB–LiDAR–thermal semantic segmentation with a generalist challenge. The workshop emphasises accuracy, real‑time feasibility and unifying datasets, tasks and communities.
Breaking the Surface is an international interdisciplinary field workshop held annually in Croatia. It brings together around 200 participants from more than 20 countries, including experts in maritime robotics, marine biology, archaeology, security and geology. The week‑long event features lectures, hands‑on tutorials, field demonstrations and company presentations, fostering collaboration and knowledge exchange in maritime robotics and underwater systems.
Hosted in Trondheim, Norway, the 11th EMRA workshop gathered researchers, industry professionals and policymakers to discuss advancements in marine robotics and sustainable marine operations. The event promotes cross‑sector collaboration, enabling technologies and applications, and supports Europe’s blue economy and digital transformation.
The OCEANS 2026 conference in Sanya, China, organised by the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society, is a large gathering for maritime professionals to learn, innovate and lead in the protection and utilisation of the world’s oceans. The event features over 100 exhibitors, 400 technical papers, hundreds of attendees and a wide range of programmes including technical tracks, tutorials, workshops and student competitions.
The IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society’s AUV Symposium is a biennial event that brings together the marine robotics community to share ideas, exchange lessons learned and foster collaboration. The symposium focuses on technologies and applications of autonomous underwater vehicles, autonomous surface vessels, underwater gliders and Lagrangian floats. Most papers centre on field robotics and data collected from real‑world deployments, and the symposium offers both a standard track and an open‑access journal track.
The IEEE MARIS symposium, held in Syros, Greece, aims to showcase cutting‑edge research and developments that propel maritime technology. Organised under the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society and IEEE Computer Society, the event includes presentations and panels on autonomous systems, robotics, IoT, artificial intelligence, big data analytics and machine learning applications in the maritime domain. It also hosts the Aegean Roboat Race and invites paper submissions, with selected works considered for the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering.
This workshop, part of ICCV 2025, combines the Workshop on Computer Vision for Analysis of Underwater Imagery and the Automated Analysis of Marine Visual Data for Environmental Monitoring. It aims to deepen understanding of marine monitoring challenges and advance computer vision techniques for underwater imagery. The workshop addresses difficulties of underwater data acquisition, including noise and scattering, and fosters collaboration across the marine vision community.
This IROS 2025 workshop addresses the challenge of transferring marine robotics research from laboratory to field applications. It highlights 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 aims to foster 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.
The Marine Imaging Workshop (5th edition) held at the Monterey Conference Center in 2024 focuses on imaging technologies for marine ecology and research. Sessions include Artificial Intelligence, Annotation and Data Management, and Capture. Talks highlight interactive machine learning methods for annotation, automated plankton detection, coral classification, and detection of deep‑sea megafauna, emphasising the integration of machine learning and imaging to advance marine ecology.
IEEE MetroSea is an international workshop dedicated to metrology and measurement for the sea. It serves as a forum for presenting advances in instrumentation, sensors and signal conditioning tailored for marine applications. Topics include sea environment monitoring, metrology‑assisted production in the sea industry, ship component measurement, calibration methods, monitoring systems, underwater vehicle exploration and obstacle detection, pollution detection, and signal and image processing for marine biology and geology.
OCEANTECH is a workshop at IROS 2025 that connects marine robotics with marine science. It gathers scientists and engineers to discuss advancements in underwater robotics, AI and marine sensing. Topics include autonomous underwater vehicles for deep‑sea mapping, robotic manipulators for coral reef restoration, advanced sensors for ocean monitoring, simulation and machine learning, and human–robot collaboration. The goal is to foster innovation and address challenges of dynamic underwater environments.
Ocean Vision AI is a collaborative initiative led by MBARI, CeNCOOS, CVision AI, Ocean Discovery League and Purdue University to accelerate automated analysis of underwater visual data. It aims to build data pipelines from image and video repositories, provide tools and infrastructure, and engage the public through platforms like FathomNet (open imagery repository), FathomVerse (community science game) and the OVAI portal. The initiative seeks to enable researchers, explorers and policymakers to harness AI for underwater data analysis and ocean stewardship.
UComms is a specialised conference focusing on the propagation of communication signals underwater and the performance of higher‑level protocols. It aims to support the intelligent choice of network‑wide standards for interoperability and has contributed achievements such as the watermark channel simulator and the JANUS digital communications standard. The conference engages researchers, engineers, equipment designers, manufacturers and users, covering optical and radio RF communications and their integration into hybrid multimodal underwater communication systems.
The CVAUI workshop series focuses on automated analysis of underwater imagery. It highlights that the ocean is a critical yet understudied environment and that automated underwater image analysis is vital for studying marine and freshwater habitats. The call for papers notes that computer vision enables analysis of huge volumes of underwater data, collected via towed systems, ROVs and AUVs, and outlines challenges such as harsh conditions, limited lighting and lack of GPS. Topics include robust vision under challenging conditions, underwater image formation and restoration, hyperspectral imaging, scene understanding, classification, detection, segmentation, navigation and mapping by robots, monitoring marine life, automatic video annotation, context-aware learning, training data and benchmarks, and underwater calibration.
