Conference paper
Automatic annotation of coral reefs using deep learning
OCEANS 2016 MTS/IEEE Monterey
OCEANS 2016 MTS/IEEE Monterey (Monterey, CA, 19/09/2016–23/09/2016)
2016
Abstract
Healthy coral reefs play a vital role in maintaining biodiversity in tropical marine ecosystems. Deep sea exploration and imaging have provided us with a great opportunity to look into the vast and complex marine ecosystems. Data acquisition from the coral reefs has facilitated the scientific investigation of these intricate ecosystems. Millions of digital images of the sea floor have been collected with the help of Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) and Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). Automated technology to monitor the health of the oceans allows for transformational ecological outcomes by standardizing methods for detecting and identifying species. Manual annotation is a tediously repetitive and a time consuming task for marine experts. It takes 10-30 minutes for a marine expert to meticulously annotate a single image. This paper aims to automate the analysis of large available AUV imagery by developing advanced deep learning tools for rapid and large-scale automatic annotation of marine coral species. Such an automated technology would greatly benefit marine ecological studies in terms of cost, speed, accuracy and thus in better quantifying the level of environmental change marine ecosystems can tolerate. We propose a deep learning based classification method for coral reefs. We also report the application of the proposed technique towards the automatic annotation of unlabelled mosaics of the coral reef in the Abrolhos Islands, Western Australia. Our proposed method automatically quantifies the coral coverage in this region and detects a decreasing trend in coral population which is in line with conclusions by marine ecologists.
Details
- Title
- Automatic annotation of coral reefs using deep learning
- Authors/Creators
- A. Mahmood (Author/Creator) - The University of Western AustraliaM. Bennamoun (Author/Creator) - The University of Western AustraliaS. An (Author/Creator) - The University of Western AustraliaF. Sohel (Author/Creator) - Murdoch UniversityF. Boussaid (Author/Creator) - The University of Western AustraliaR. Hovey (Author/Creator) - The University of Western AustraliaG. Kendrick (Author/Creator) - The University of Western AustraliaR.B. Fisher (Author/Creator) - University of Edinburgh
- Publication Details
- OCEANS 2016 MTS/IEEE Monterey
- Conference
- OCEANS 2016 MTS/IEEE Monterey (Monterey, CA, 19/09/2016–23/09/2016)
- Identifiers
- 991005541746707891
- Murdoch Affiliation
- School of Engineering and Information Technology
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Conference paper
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