Authors: Marios Xanthidis, Alberto {Quattrini Li}, Ioannis Rekleitis
Abstract: Coral reefs exhibit the highest biodiversity in the ocean and are an extremely vulnerable ecosystem. Monitoring the state of the reefs is a tedious process performed by human divers which can be automated. This paper presents the use of several inexpensive drifting sensor nodes in order to reconstruct a visual mosaic of a shallow coral reef. The drifters produce geo-referenced visual data from a downward facing camera while floating above a shallow-water coral reef. The vision is augmented with inertial data enabling the recovery of the drifter’s attitude. A brief description of the drifters together with a framework to produce visual mosaics are discussed. Experimental results from a deployment over the Folkestone Marine Reserve in Barbados demonstrating the utility of our approach are presented.