Abstract
Corals are crucial animals as they support a large part of marine life. The automatic classification of corals species based on underwater images is important as it can help experts to track and detect threatened and vulnerable coral species. However, this classification is complicated due to the nature of coral underwater images and the fact that current underwater coral datasets are unrealistic as they contain only texture images, while the images taken by autonomous underwater vehicles show the complete coral structure. The objective of this paper is two-fold. The first is to build a dataset that is representative of the problem of classifying underwater coral images, the StructureRSMAS dataset. The second is to build a classifier capable of resolving the real problem of classifying corals, based either on texture or structure images. We have achieved this by using a two-level classifier composed of three ResNet models. The first level recognizes whether the input image is a texture or a structure image. Then, the second level identifies the coral species. To do this, we have used a known texture dataset, RSMAS, and StructureRSMAS.
•Creation of a new coral structure dataset.•Study the performance of promising CNNs in the classification of coral images.•Analyse data augmentation on the performance of the coral classification models.•Evaluate image enhancement techniques on the performance of the models.•Creation of a two-level model able to classify any coral image, texture or structure.