PHOTOMOSAICS
This fly-through provides
baseline data for Looe Key Reef.
With the help of digital photography, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence (AI), Mission: Iconic Reefs managers can understand how the reef evolves as hundreds of thousands of corals are outplanted. Since December of 2021, the M:IR field team has been gliding over the ocean floor with cameras in hand, capturing almost over half a million individual images that are then uploaded into a computer. Then, colleagues at the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science use software that references targets on the seafloor along with site depth information to stitch together the photos and create 3D images of the reef. The process is called structure from motion. Resulting images are then analyzed with AI to measure changes to corals, the seafloor, and the reef structure from year to year down to the centimeter scale.
M:IR monitoring of reef habitats, benthic communities, and coral populations will rely heavily on high resolution, georeferenced large-area imagery (LAI) to represent both relative baseline conditions, as well as change through time resulting from restoration. LAI refers to composite image-based reconstructions (e.g., 3 dimensional [3D] models or orthophotomosaics) generated from multiple overlapping component images. These products can be used to generate detailed permanent records of natural scenes and represent a powerful tool to study ecological processes. LAI can be collected at any spatial scale, but is generally of a greater spatial extent than that of the individual photographs used to generate the reconstructions.