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An efficient coral survey method based on a large-scale 3-D structure model obtained by Speedy Sea Scanner and U-Net segmentation

Over the last 3 decades, a large portion of coral cover has been lost around the globe. This significant decline necessitates a rapid assessment of coral reef health to enable more effective management. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for coral cover estimation and demonstrate its viab...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Mizuno, Katsunori, Terayama, Kei, Hagino, Seiichiro, Tabeta, Shigeru, Sakamoto, Shingo, Ogawa, Toshihiro, Sugimoto, Kenichi, Fukami, Hironobu
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7395762/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32737334
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-69400-5
Descripción
Sumario:Over the last 3 decades, a large portion of coral cover has been lost around the globe. This significant decline necessitates a rapid assessment of coral reef health to enable more effective management. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for coral cover estimation and demonstrate its viability. A large-scale 3-D structure model, with resolutions in the x, y and z planes of 0.01 m, was successfully generated by means of a towed optical camera array system (Speedy Sea Scanner). The survey efficiency attained was 12,146 m(2)/h. In addition, we propose a segmentation method utilizing U-Net architecture and estimate coral coverage using a large-scale 2-D image. The U-Net-based segmentation method has shown higher accuracy than pixelwise CNN modeling. Moreover, the computational cost of a U-Net-based method is much lower than that of a pixelwise CNN-based one. We believe that an array of these survey tools can contribute to the rapid assessment of coral reefs.