Computer Vision Technology Applications for Assessing Coral Reef Health

摘要: Coral reefs have experienced serious declines in recent decades due to commercial and subsistence harvesting, environmental degradation related to burgeoning human communities, and rising ocean temperatures. New technologies are needed to improve the efficiency of monitoring and assessing the health of global coral reef communities. A convergence of several rapidly advancing technologies, including digital imaging, computational mass storage and processing speed, integrated with computer vision image analysis now makes it feasible to acquire, archive, and digitally classify aspects of coral reef community structure. Underwater imagery has been acquired in Panama and Fiji with specific objectives focused on the evaluation of computer vision problems including acquisition of training data sets, and addressing the challenges associated with illumination, color correction, turbidity, distance to target …