Journal Articles

VL-Explore: Zero-shot Vision-Language Exploration and Target Discovery by Mobile Robots

Y. Zhang, A. Abdullah, S. J. Koppal, and M. J. Islam.

In Review, 2025.

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BlueME: Robust Underwater Robot-to-Robot Communication Using Compact Magnetoelectric Antennas

M. Talebi, S. Mahmud, A. Khalifa, and M. J. Islam.

In Review, 2025.

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NemeSys: An Online Underwater Explorer with Goal-Driven Adaptive Autonomy

A. Abdullah, A. Gupta, V. Ramesh, S. Patel, and M. J. Islam.

In Review, 2025.

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Single-Step Latent Diffusion for Underwater Image Restoration

J. Wu, T. Wang, M.A.B. Siddique, M. J. Islam, C. Fermuller, Y. Aloimonos, C. A. Metzler.

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI), 2025. Presented at ICCP-2025.
*Impact Factor: 20.8

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HiRQA: Hierarchical Ranking and Quality Alignment for Opinion-Unaware Image Quality Assessment

V. Ramesh, H. Wang, and M. J. Islam.

In Review, 2025.

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UStyle: Waterbody Style Transfer of Underwater Scenes by Depth-guided High-Fidelity Feature Synthesis

M.A.B. Siddique, V. Ramesh, J. Liu, P. Singh, and M. J. Islam.

In Review, 2025.

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Human-Machine Interfaces for Subsea Telerobotics: from Soda-straw to Natural Language Interactions

A. Abdullah, R. Chen, D. Blow, T. Uthai, E. Du, and M. J. Islam.

In Review, 2025.

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AquaFuse: Waterbody Fusion for Physics Guided View Synthesis of Underwater Scenes

M.A.B. Siddique, J. Wu, I. Rekleitis, and M. J. Islam.

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), vol. 10 , no. 5, 2025.
*Impact Factor: 5.2

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LightViz: Autonomous Light-field Sensing and Mapping for Distributed Light Pollution Monitoring

S. Huang, K.F.F. Suhi, and M. J. Islam.

Springer Nature Environmental Monitoring and Assessment (EMA), vol. 197, no. 384, 2025.
*Impact Factor: 3.1

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Books

Chapter-9: Computer Vision Applications in Underwater Robotics and Oceanography.
Computer Vision: Challenges, Trends, and Opportunities

M. J. Islam, A.Q. Li, Y. Girdhar, and I. Rekleitis.

CRC Press, 2024, p.173, eBook ISBN9781003328957.

Conference Proceedings

DGIQA: Depth-guided Feature Attention and Refinement for Generalizable Image Quality Assessment

V. Ramesh, J. Liu, H. Wang, and M. J. Islam.

In Review, 2025.

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Demonstrating CavePI: Autonomous Exploration of Underwater Caves by Semantic Guidance

A. Gupta, A. Abdullah, X. Li, V. Ramesh, I. Rekleitis, and M. J. Islam.

Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2025, Los Angeles, CA, US. (Acceptance Rate: 27%)

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Detection and Localization of Acoustic Vulnerabilities of Underwater Data Centers for Remote Surveillance

D. Blow, A. Abdullah, J. M. Sheldon, W. Zhu, S. Rampazzi, and M. J. Islam.

SPIE Defense and Commercial Sensing, 2025, Orlando, FL, US.

Word2Wave: Language Driven Mission Programming for Efficient Subsea Deployments of Marine Robots

R. Chen, D. Blow, A. Abdullah, and M. J. Islam.

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025

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SubSense: VR-Haptic and Motor Feedback for Immersive Control in Subsea Telerobotics

R. Chen, D. Blow, A. Abdullah, and M. J. Islam.

The OCEANS 2025 Great Lakes conference 250515 (113), US, 2025.
Ego-to-Exo: Interfacing Third Person Visuals from Egocentric Views in Real-time for Improved ROV Teleoperation

A. Abdullah, R. Chen, I. Rekleitis, and M. J. Islam.

International Symposium on Robotics Research (ISRR), CA, US 2024.

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Edge-Centric Real-Time Segmentation for Autonomous Underwater Cave Exploration

M. Mohammadi, A. Abdullah, A. Juneja, I. Rekleitis, M. J. Islam, and R. Zand.

IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA), FL, US, 2024.
AquaSonic: Acoustic Manipulation of Underwater Data Center Operations and Resource Management

J. M. Sheldon, W. Zhu, A. Abdullah, S.H.V Bhupathiraju, T. Sugawara, K. Butler, M. J. Islam, S. Rampazzi.

45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2024, San Francisco, CA, US.(Acceptance Rate: 17.8%)

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A Mobile Robotic Solution for Dense Water Quality Sensing and Monitoring

A. Abdullah, M. Talebi, R. Chen, and M. J. Islam.

Robots for Understanding Natural Ecosystems (RUNE) Workshop at IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024, Yokohama, Japan.
Dynamic Light-field Sensing for Distributed Light Pollution Monitoring

S. Huang, A. Abdullah, R. Chen, and M. J. Islam.

Robots for Understanding Natural Ecosystems (RUNE) Workshop at IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024, Yokohama, Japan.
CaveSeg: Deep Semantic Segmentation and Scene Parsing for Autonomous Underwater Cave Exploration

A. Abdullah, T. Barua, Z. Chen, R. Tibbetts, M. J. Islam, and I. Rekleitis.

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024, Yokohama, Japan.

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Eye On the Back: Augmented Visuals for Improved ROV Teleoperation in Deep Water Surveillance and Inspection

M. J. Islam

SPIE Defense and Commercial Sensing, 2024, National Harbor, Maryland, US.
Caveline Detection at the Edge for Autonomous Underwater Cave Exploration and Mapping

M. Mohammadi, S. Huang, T. Barua, I. Rekleitis, M. J. Islam, and R. Zand.

IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA), 2023, Jacksonville, US.
Weakly Supervised Caveline Detection For AUV Navigation Inside Underwater Caves

B. Yu, R. Tibbetts, T. Barua, A. Morales, I. Rekleitis, and M. J. Islam.

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems(IROS), 2023, Michigan, US.

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3D Reconstruction of Underwater Scenes using Nonlinear Domain Projection

J. Wu, B. Yu, and M. J. Islam.

Best paper award at the IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence (CAI) 2023, Santa Clara, CA, US.

Deep Note: Can Acoustic Interference Damage the Availability of Hard Disk Storage in Underwater Data Centers?

J. M. Sheldon, W. Zhu, A. Abdullah, K. Butler, M. J. Islam, S. Rampazzi.

Best paper award at the ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems (HotStorage), 2023, Boston, MA, US.

UDepth: Fast Monocular Depth Estimation for Visually-guided Underwater Robots

B. Yu, J. Wu, and M. J. Islam.

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023, London, UK.

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SVAM: Saliency-guided Visual Attention Modeling by Autonomous Underwater Robots

M. J. Islam, R. Wang, and J. Sattar.

Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), P048, 2022, NYC, NY, US. (Acceptance Rate: 32%)

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Dr. Islam's Previous Work

Robot-to-Robot Relative Pose Estimation using Humans as Markers

M. J. Islam, J. Mo, and J. Sattar.

Autonomous Robots (AuRO), vol. 45, no. 4, pp. 579–593, 2021, doi: 10.1007/s10514-021-09985-6.
*Impact Factor: 3.7

IMU-Assisted Learning of Single-View Rolling Shutter Correction

J. Mo, M. J. Islam and J. Sattar.

Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2021

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Fast Direct Stereo Visual SLAM

J. Mo, M. J. Islam and J. Sattar.

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L*), vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 778-785, 2021, doi: 10.1109/LRA.2021.3133860, 2021.
*Impact Factor: 3.74

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Fast Underwater Image Enhancement for Improved Visual Perception

M. J. Islam, Y. Xia, and J. Sattar.

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L*), vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 3227-3234, 2020, doi: 10.1109/LRA.2020.2974710.
*Impact Factor: 3.61

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Simultaneous Enhancement and Super-Resolution of Underwater Imagery for Improved Visual Perception

M. J. Islam, P. Luo, and J. Sattar.

Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2020. *(Acceptance Rate: 26.7%)

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M. J. Islam C. Edge, Y. Xiao, P. Luo, M. Mehtaz, C. Morse, S. S. Enan, and J. Sattar.

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2020, Virtual.

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Underwater Image Super-Resolution using Deep Residual Multipliers

M. J. Islam S. S. Enan, P. Luo, and J. Sattar.

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2020, Virtual.

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Robotic Detection of Marine Litter using Deep Visual Detection Models

M. Fulton J. Hong, M. J. Islam, and J. Sattar.

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2019, Montreal, Canada.

Person Following by Autonomous Robots: A Categorical Overview

M. J. Islam, J. Hong, and J. Sattar.

International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR*), vol. 38, no. 14, pp. 1581-1618, 2019, doi: 10.1177/0278364919881683.
*Impact Factor: 6.134

Understanding Human Motion and Gestures for Underwater Human-Robot Collaboration

M. J. Islam, M. Fulton, and J. Sattar.

Journal of Field Robotics (JFR*), 2018, doi: 10.1002/rob.21837.*Impact Factor: 4.345

Enhancing Underwater Imagery using Generative Adversarial Networks

C. Fabbri, M. J. Islam and J. Sattar.

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 7159-7165, 2018, Brisbane, Australia.

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Underwater Multi-Robot Convoying using Visual Tracking by Detection

F. Shkurti, W. Chang, P. Henderson, M. j. Islam, J. C. G. Higuera, J. Li, T. Manderson, A. Xu, G. Dudek, and J. Sattar.

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pp. 4189-4196, 2017, Vancouver, Canada.