Shallow water habitats monitoring using simulated PRISMA hyperspectral data and Depth Invariant Index – the case of coral reef in Maldives

Abstract

Environmental crises have negative impact to marine ecosystems. Coral reefs which offer great wealth of habitats are considered one of the most vulnerable. Remote sensing approaches can be utilized for monitoring, but scattering and absorption under water pose serious challenges to passive sensors. While hyperspectral data are often considered more effective than multispectral data, they are often unavailable. In this study, we describe preliminary effort to combine depth invariant index (DII) and simulated hyperspectral data for habitat classification in shallow water. Initial observations suggest incorporating DII in classification generate more homogenous patches in similar estimated depths, which potentially improves classification accuracies. Pre-processing procedure and the generation of DII are implemented using Sen2Coral Toolbox in SNAP, which are useful. Further studies with groundtruth measurement are needed to establish more conclusive discussions.