The First Automatic Method for Mapping the Pothole in Seagrass

There is a vital need to map seagrass ecosystems in order to determine worldwide abundance and distribution. Currently there is no established method for mapping the pothole or scars in seagrass. Detection of seagrass with optical remote sensing is challenged by the fact that light is attenuated as it passes through the water column and reflects back from the benthos. Optical remote sensing of seagrass is only possible if the water is shallow and relatively clear. In reality, coastal waters are commonly turbid, and seagrasses can grow under 10 meters of water or even deeper. One of the most precise sensors to map the seagrass disturbance is side scan sonar. Underwater acoustics mapping produces a high definition, two-dimensional sonar image of seagrass ecosystems. This paper proposes a methodology which detects seagrass potholes in sonar images. Side scan sonar images usually contain speckle noise and uneven illumination across the image. Moreover, disturbance presents complex patterns where most segmentation techniques will fail. In this paper, the quality of image is improved in the first stage using adaptive thresholding and wavelet denoising techniques. In the next step, a novel level set technique is applied to identify the pothole patterns. Our method is robust to noise and uneven illumination. Moreover it can detect the complex pothole patterns. We tested our proposed approach on a collection of underwater sonar images taken from Laguna Madre in Texas. Experimental results in comparison with the ground-truth show the efficiency of the proposed method.