Estimation of Coral Rubble Quantity using Edge Detection and Morphological- Based Methods

Abstract

Reef rubble represents the broken components of the coral and reef structure which could be in the form of dead, broken or other fragmented coral. The process to estimate the distribution of reef rubble is currently done manually and thus takes a long time to complete and is laborious. This paper presents an image-processing-based method to estimate the distribution of reef rubbles in a coral reef environment from a still image. The method is basically a series of image processing steps including image complement, image binarization, edge detection, smoothing by Weiner filter and followed by erosion and dilation process. The experimental results showed that the system was able to roughly estimate the distribution of reef rubble.