Rip Current Segmentation: A Novel Benchmark and YOLOv8 Baseline Results
This paper addresses the challenging problem of automated rip current detection in beach environments. We formally introduce the task of instance-level rip current segmentation—a novel formulation for fine-grained, pixel-accurate identification. To support this task, we construct the first high-quality multimodal benchmark dataset, comprising 2,466 images with polygon annotations and 17 drone-captured video sequences (24K frames) with frame-level mask annotations. Methodologically, we adapt the YOLOv8 instance segmentation architecture into a lightweight, real-time framework capable of processing both static images and video streams. Our optimized YOLOv8-nano variant achieves 88.94% mAP₅₀ on the validation set and 81.21% macro-average precision on test videos. All code, pre-trained models, and annotated data are publicly released. This work establishes a deployable baseline—suitable for edge devices—for intelligent, real-time rip current monitoring, thereby advancing both benchmarking and practical deployment in coastal safety applications.