Papers for

volcanology teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Interactive tool improves volcanic plume image segmentation accuracy

GuidedSAM-Plume: An Expert-Guided Segmentation Framework for Volcanic Plumes

Abstract: Quantitative analysis of environmental phenomena increasingly relies on image-based measurements. In volcanology, the geometric characterization of volcanic plumes and clouds from RGB images remains hindered by the scarcity of dedicated segmentation solutions and partially handcrafted annotations remain widely prevalent. We present GuidedSAM-Plume, an open-source expert-guided framework tailored for the interactive segmentation of volcanic plumes and clouds. It leverages the zero-shot, spatial prompt-based capabilities of SAM2. The framework was thoroughly validated on a challenging dataset through dedicated segmentation metrics and field-relevant volcanological descriptors. From minimal user inputs, it is able to significantly increase performance compared to fully automatic dedicated solutions while preserving the reliability of derived volcanological parameters. The absence of retraining requirements lowers adoption barriers within the volcanological community, and the framework's demonstrated suitability for complex, diffuse plume-shaped phenomena extends its applicability to broader environmental science domains. The re-annotated dataset, produced under the guidance of expert volcanologists within the proposed framework, ultimately yields a more standardized release. The framework and accompanying dataset are made available at https://github.com/tad-damo/GuidedSAM-Plume.

Wed 21 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Measuring features of volcanic smoke and clouds in pictures is hard because there aren't many good automatic tools to do it. This paper shows a new method called GuidedSAM-Plume that helps experts mark these plumes in images more accurately by giving simple hints to a powerful AI model. The new method works much better than fully automatic ones without needing extra training and keeps the important measurements reliable. The authors also created a better dataset with expert guidance that can be used widely by volcanologists and beyond.
Open → 2610.29825v1