Laura Weihl will give a talk about Deep Learning for Eelgrass Detection and Coverage Estimation in the Wild. Details below.
SPEAKER
Laura Weihl, PhD fellow, ITU.
TITLE
Deep Learning for Eelgrass Detection and Coverage Estimation in the Wild
ABSTRACT
Seagrass meadows are vital to marine ecosystems, supporting carbon sequestration, water filtration, and biodiversity conservation. However, traditional manual methods for assessing seagrass coverage from underwater video transects are labour-intensive and prone to subjective interpretation. This presentation explores the application of transfer learning with four deep neural networks – ResNet, InceptionNetV3, DenseNet, and Vision Transformer (ViT) – to automate seagrass detection and coverage estimation. We highlight ViT’s unique attention mechanism, which excels at capturing complex spatial relationships in underwater imagery, and demonstrate how transfer learning and underwater image enhancement techniques can boost classification performance, offering a scalable, efficient solution for seagrass monitoring and environmental impact assessments.