Comparative Assessment of Deep Learning Architectures for Underwater Subsurface Kelp Forest Segmentation with The Kelp-o-Tron
Submerged kelp forests are vital coastal ecosystems that support marine biodiversity and ecosystem dynamics, yet accurate underwater kelp segmentation remains challenging due to optical degradation, illumination variability, turbidity, overlapping vegetation, and complex benthic backgrounds. We systematically evaluated three deep learning semantic segmentation frameworks, ResNet34-U-Net, ResNet50-DeepLabV3, and a hybrid ResNet50-ASPP-Transformer architecture, for kelp detection using high-resolution underwater RGB imagery collected from northeastern U.S. coastal waters. A dataset of 3,395 SSeg
