<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//NLM//DTD Journal Publishing DTD v3.0 20080202//EN" "https://jats.nlm.nih.gov/nlm-dtd/publishing/3.0/journalpublishing3.dtd">
<article xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" article-type="data-paper" specific-use="SMUR" dtd-version="3.0" xml:lang="en">
<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ESSDD</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>Earth System Science Data Discussions</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ESSDD</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">1866-3591</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name></publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/essd-2026-565</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>BenthiCat: An opti-acoustic dataset for advancing benthic classification and habitat mapping</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Rajani</surname>
<given-names>Hayat</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2541-2787</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Franchi</surname>
<given-names>Valerio</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Martinez-Clavel Valles</surname>
<given-names>Borja</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Ramos</surname>
<given-names>Raimon</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Garcia</surname>
<given-names>Rafael</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Gracias</surname>
<given-names>Nuno</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Computer Vision and Robotics Research Institute, University of Girona, Spain</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Tecnoambiente SLU, Spain</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>10</day>
<month>08</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2026</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>32</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Hayat Rajani et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-565/">This article is available from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-565/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-565/essd-2026-565.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2026-565/essd-2026-565.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Benthic habitat mapping is fundamental for understanding marine ecosystems, guiding conservation efforts, and supporting sustainable resource management. Yet, the scarcity of large, annotated datasets limits the development and benchmarking of machine learning models in this domain. This paper introduces a thorough multi-modal dataset, comprising about a million side-scan sonar (SSS) tiles collected along the coast of Catalonia (Spain), complemented by bathymetric maps and a set of co-registered optical images from targeted surveys using an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). Approximately 36000 of the SSS tiles have been manually annotated with segmentation masks to enable supervised fine-tuning of classification models. All the raw sensor data, together with mosaics, are also released to support further exploration and algorithm development. To address challenges in multi-sensor data fusion for AUVs, we spatially associate optical images with corresponding SSS tiles, facilitating self-supervised, cross-modal representation learning. Accompanying open-source preprocessing and annotation tools are provided to enhance accessibility and encourage research. This resource aims to establish a standardized benchmark for underwater habitat mapping, promoting advancements in autonomous seafloor classification and multi-sensor integration.</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="32"/></counts>
<funding-group>
<award-group id="gs1">
<funding-source>Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades</funding-source>
<award-id>PID2023-149413OB-I00</award-id>
<award-id>CNS2023-144688</award-id>
</award-group>
</funding-group>
</article-meta>
</front>
<body/>
<back>
</back>
</article>