Researchers from the University of New Orleans earned the #1 ranking in the segmentation task of the NTIRE 2026 Rip Current Detection and Segmentation Challenge, an international competition held in conjunction with CVPR 2026, one of the world’s leading conferences in computer vision and artificial intelligence.
The UNO team, “UNO Pixel Pros,” is based in the Department of Computer Science at the University of New Orleans. Team members include Abdullah Naeem, Anav Katwal, Ayon Dey, and computer science professor Md Tamjidul Hoque.
The team developed an advanced artificial intelligence system to detect and segment rip currents, powerful and fast-moving channels of water that are responsible for numerous beach-related fatalities worldwide. The research has potential applications in future AI-assisted coastal monitoring and beach safety systems.
Their method achieved the highest overall ranking among participating teams under a rigorous evaluation framework that measured both detection accuracy and segmentation quality.
The results were independently documented in a recent arXiv study, further validating the accuracy and robustness of the team’s approach.
This achievement highlights the University of New Orleans’ growing leadership in artificial intelligence research and its application to real-world challenges in coastal safety, environmental monitoring, and resilient infrastructure systems.
