Abstract
An increasing amount of anthropogenic marine debris is pervading the earth’s environmental systems, resulting in an enormous threat to living organisms. Additionally, the large amount of marine debris around the world has been investigated mostly through tedious manual methods. Therefore, we propose the use of a new technique, light detection and ranging (LIDAR), for the semi-automatic recognition of marine debris on a beach because of its substantially more efficient role in comparison with other more laborious methods. Our results revealed that LIDAR should be used for the classification of marine debris into plastic, paper, cloth and metal. Additionally, we reconstructed a 3-dimensional model of different types of debris on a beach with a high validity of debris revivification using LIDAR-based individual separation. These findings demonstrate that the availability of this new technique enables detailed observations to be made of debris on a large beach that was previously not possible. It is strongly suggested that LIDAR could be implemented as an appropriate monitoring tool for marine debris by global researchers and governments.
Highlights
This study proposes a semi-automatic method to analyze the amount and morphology of marine debris on the basis of the light detection and ranging (LIDAR) technique
The echo amplitude of the different marine debris differed in the distribution regions, as characterized by distinct dominants (Fig. 2a)
We can benefit from the use of LIDAR technology to scan marine debris and further extract and classify marine debris according to its waveform features, which have been verified by our controlled test and three cruise field validation tests (Figs 3 and 5)
Summary
This study proposes a semi-automatic method to analyze the amount and morphology of marine debris on the basis of the LIDAR technique. The idea of semi-automatic method mainly depends on laser scanner and computer with less human interventions, which agrees well with “supervised classification”[27]. LIDAR technology, which is a cost-effective and highly precise tool for quantifying the number and configuration of marine debris, could contribute to improving traditional monitoring methods
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