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Detection of dugongs from unmanned aerial vehicles
Conference paper

Detection of dugongs from unmanned aerial vehicles

F. Maire, L. Mejias, A. Hodgson and G. Duclos
2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, pp.2750-2756
IEEE
26th IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems: New Horizon, IROS 2013 (Tokyo; Japan, 03/11/2013–08/11/2013)
2013
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS.2013.6696745
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Abstract

Monitoring and estimation of marine populations is of paramount importance for the conservation and management of sea species. Regular surveys are used to this purpose followed often by a manual counting process. This paper proposes an algorithm for automatic detection of dugongs from imagery taken in aerial surveys. Our algorithm exploits the fact that dugongs are rare in most images, therefore we determine regions of interest partially based on color rarity. This simple observation makes the system robust to changes in illumination. We also show that by applying the extended-maxima transform on red-ratio images, submerged dugongs with very fuzzy edges can be detected. Performance figures obtained here are promising in terms of degree of confidence in the detection of marine species, but more importantly our approach represents a significant step in automating this type of surveys.

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