The Impact of Image Enhancement and Transfer Learning Techniques on Marine Habitat Mapping

Abstract

Marine habitat mapping is primarily done to monitor and preserve underwater ecosystems. Images captured in a marine environment suffer from acidification, pollutions, waste chemicals, and lighting conditions. Human beings are progressing fast in terms of technology and are also responsible for the degradations of ecosystems, both marine and land habitats. Marine biologists possess a lot of data for the underwater environment, but it is hard to analyze, and the task becomes tiresome. Automating this process would help marine biologists quickly monitor the environment and preserve it. Our research focuses on coral reef classification and two critical aspects, i.e., Image enhancement and recognition of coral reefs. Image enhancement plays an essential role in marine habitat mapping because of the environment in which images are taken. The literature contains many image enhancement techniques for underwater. The authors want to determine whether a single image enhancement technique is suitable for coral reefs. Four image enhancement techniques based on an extensive literature review are selected. We have used DenseNet-169 and MobileNet for image classification. It has been reported that DenseNet-169 has excellent results for coral reefs classification. Histogram techniques combined with DenseNet-169 for classification resulted in higher classification rates.