SUCRe: Leveraging Scene Structure for Underwater Color Restoration

Underwater images are altered by the physical characteristics of the medium through which light rays pass before reaching the optical sensor. Scattering and wavelength-dependent absorption significantly modify the captured colors depending on the distance of observed elements to the image plane. In this paper, we aim to recover an image of the scene as if the water had no effect on light propagation. We introduce SUCRe, a novel method that exploits the scene's 3D structure for underwater color restoration. By following points in multiple images and tracking their intensities at different distances to the sensor, we constrain the optimization of the parameters in an underwater image formation model and retrieve unattenuated pixel intensities. We conduct extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses of our approach in a variety of scenarios ranging from natural light to deep-sea environments using three underwater datasets acquired from real-world scenarios and one synthetic dataset. We also compare the performance of the proposed approach with that of a wide range of existing state-of-the-art methods. The results demonstrate a consistent benefit of exploiting multiple views across a spectrum of objective metrics. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/clementinboittiaux/sucre

Seabed image acquisition and survey design for cold water coral mound characterisation

Cold-water coral (CWC) habitats are commonly regarded as hotspots of biodiversity in the deep-sea. However, a standardised approach to monitoring the effects of climate change, anthropogenic impact and natural variability through video-surveying on these habitats is poorly-established. This study is the first attempt at standardising a cost-effective video-survey design specific to small CWC mounds in order to accurately determine the proportion of facies across their surface. The Piddington Mound of the Moira Mounds, Porcupine Seabight, offshore Ireland has been entirely imaged by downward-facing video in 2011 and 2015. The 2011 video data is navigated into a full-mound, georeferenced video mosaic. A quadrat-based manual classification of this video mosaic at 0.25 m2 resolution shows the exact proportion of facies abundance across the mound surface. The minimum number of random downward-facing images from the mound are determined to accurately characterise mound surface facies proportions. This minimum sample size is used to test the effectiveness of various common survey designs for ROV-video-based habitat investigations. Single-pass video lines are not representative of the mound surface whilst gridded survey designs yield best results, similar to 100% mound coverage. The minimum sample size and manual classification are applied to the 2015 video data to show a 19% mound surface facies change over 4 years at 0.25 m2 resolution. The proportion of live coral facies show little change while coral rubble facies show most change. This highlights an inconsistency between temporally-separated data sets and implies that in 20 years, the mound surface may almost entirely change

Monitoring ecological dynamics on complex hydrothermal structures: A novel photogrammetry approach reveals fine‐scale variability of vent assemblages

We set out to characterize the fine-scale processes acting on interannual dynamics of deep-sea vent fauna by using a novel approach involving a 5-yr time series of 3D photogrammetry models acquired at the Eiffel Tower sulfide edifice (Lucky Strike vent field, Mid-Atlantic Ridge). Consistently, with the overall stability of the vent edifice, total mussel cover did not undergo drastic changes, suggesting that they have been at a climax stage for at least 25 yr based on previous data. Successional patterns showed consistency over time, illustrating the dynamic equilibrium of the ecological system. In contrast, microbial mats significantly declined, possibly due to magmatic events. The remaining environmental variability consisted of decimeter-scale displacement of vent outflows, resulting from their opening or closure or from the progressive accretion of sulfide material. As a result, vent mussels showed submeter variability in the immediate vicinity of vent exits, possibly by repositioning in response to that fine-scale regime of change. As former studies were not able to quantify processes at submeter scales in complex settings, this pioneering work demonstrates the potential of 3D photogrammetry models for conducting long-term monitoring in the deep sea. We observed that the ability of mussels to displace may enable them to cope with changing local conditions in a stable system. However, the long-term stability of mussel assemblages questions their capacity to withstand large-scale disturbances and may imply a low resilience of these “climax” communities. This suggests that they may be particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of mining activities in hydrothermal ecosystems

Imagerie sar polarimétrique interférométrique pour l'estimation de la biomasse

National audienc

Influence du choix de la polarisation émise sur les performances d’estimation de la hauteur des arbres avec le système SAR polarimétrique interférométrique compact et le modèle RVoG

National audienc

Influence des connaissances a priori pour l’estimation de la hauteur des arbres en imagerie polarimétrique interférométrique SAR avec le modèle RVoG

National audienc

Influence of the nature of a priori knowledge on the precision of vegetation height estimation in polarimetric SAR interferometry

International audienc

Contraste et précision en polarimétrie interférométrique radar pour l'étude de la biomasse

National audienc

Cramer-Rao Lower Bound Analysis of Vegetation Height Estimation With Random Volume Over Ground Model and Polarimetric SAR Interferometry

International audienceThe random volume over ground model, which is based on a simple description of the electromagnetic wave interaction with a vegetated media, allows one to define techniques to estimate the vegetation height from the polarimetric interferometric synthetic aperture radar observations. We discuss this issue with the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) which provides a minimal bound of the variance independently of the estimation if it is unbiased. The usefulness of this approach is illustrated on three different examples. The first example deals with the influence of a priori knowledge of some physical parameters. We show that reducing the number of unknown physical parameters does not necessarily improve the CRLB. The second example focus on the efficiency of the Cloude et al. height estimator. On the considered data, this estimator reaches the CRLB when the standard deviation equals approximately one meter. In the third example we optimize the radar baseline

Analysis of vegetation height estimation fluctuations of PolInSAR measurement using the Cramer Rao bound

International audienc