Texture analysis of seabed images: Quantifying the presence of Posidonia oceanica at Palma Bay

Abstract

An automatic classifier algorithm has been designed to assess the population of Posidonia oceanica over a set of underwater images at Palma Bay. Law's energy filters and statistical descriptors of the Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix have been use to correctly classify the input image patches in two classes: Posidonia oceanica or not Posidonia oceanica. The input images have been first preprocessed and splitted in three different patch sizes in order to find the best patch size to better classify this seagrass. From all the attributes obtained in these patches, a best subset algorithm has been run to choose the best ones and a decision tree classifier has been trained. The classifier was made by training a Logistic Model Tree from 125 pre-classified images. This classifier was finally tested on 100 new images. The classifier outputs gray level images where black color indicates Posidonia oceanica presence and white no presence. Intermediate values are obtained by overlapping the processed patches, resulting in a smoother final result. This images can be merged in an offline process to obtain density maps of this algae in the sea.