Water Penetrating Sensor for Feature Extraction of Benthic Habitat using Remotely Sensed Information in Shallow Water

Abstract

In this paper, data analysis was performed on the spatial features of the benthic habitat using the Lowrance Elite CHIRP 7 SoNAR system embedded with an 80 and 455 KHz transducer in shallow water. Basically, the system addresses the need for information from the benthic habitat in order by means of cheaper solution. The system used was relatively cheaper and way smaller in scale without leaving behind the functionality of the large scale systems. Data was gathered from benthic habitat through the transceiver and analyzed using image processing techniques loaded in Raspberry Pi for spatial features extraction. It was found that the distribution of fishes and vegetation underwater has a direct correlation to the shape of the terrain. Three different terrains were analyzed, minimum deviation slope terrain, parabolic slope terrain and varying slope terrain, wherein the last mentioned terrain produced the highest distribution for both fishes and vegetation.