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© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

Healthy coral reefs provide diverse habitats for marine life, playing a crucial role in marine ecosystems. Coral health is under threat due to global climate change, ocean pollution, and other environmental stressors, leading to coral bleaching. Coral bleaching disrupts the symbiotic relationship between corals and algae, ultimately impacting the entire marine ecosystem. Processing complex underwater images manually is time-consuming and burdensome for marine experts. To rapidly locate and monitor coral health, deep neural networks are employed for identifying coral categories, which can facilitate the automated processing of extensive underwater imaging data. However, these classification networks may overlook critical classification criteria like color and texture. This paper proposes a multi-local perception network (ML-Net) for image classification of healthy and bleached corals. ML-Net focuses on local features of coral targets, leveraging valuable information for image classification. Specifically, the proposed multi-branch local adaptive block extracts image details through parallel convolution kernels. Then, the proposed multi-scale local fusion block integrates features of different scales vertically, enhancing the detailed information within the deep network. Residual structures in the shallow network transmit local information with more texture and color to the deep network. Both horizontal and vertical multi-scale fusion blocks in deep networks are used to capture and retain local details. We evaluated ML-Net using six evaluation metrics on the Bleached and Unbleached Corals Classification dataset. In particular, ML-Net achieves an ACC result of 86.35, which is 4.36 higher than ResNet and 8.5 higher than ConvNext. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modules for coral classification in underwater environments.

Details

Title
ML-Net: A Multi-Local Perception Network for Healthy and Bleached Coral Image Classification
Author
Wang, Sai 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Nan-Lin, Chen 2 ; Yong-Duo Song 2 ; Tuan-Tuan, Wang 3 ; Wen, Jing 2 ; Tuan-Qi, Guo 4 ; Hong-Jin, Zhang 5 ; Ling, Mo 6 ; Hao-Ran, Ma 5 ; Xiang, Lei 7 

 State Key Laboratory of Marine Resource Utilization in South China Sea, Hainan University, Haikou 570228, China; [email protected] (S.W.); ; School of Ecology and Environment, Hainan University, Haikou 570228, China 
 State Key Laboratory of Marine Resource Utilization in South China Sea, Hainan University, Haikou 570228, China; [email protected] (S.W.); 
 School of Ecology and Environment, Hainan University, Haikou 570228, China 
 State Key Laboratory of Marine Resource Utilization in South China Sea, Hainan University, Haikou 570228, China; [email protected] (S.W.); ; Hainan Qingxiao Environmental Testing Co., Ltd., Sanya 572024, China 
 State Key Laboratory of Marine Resource Utilization in South China Sea, Hainan University, Haikou 570228, China; [email protected] (S.W.); ; Hainan Qianchao Ecological Technology Co., Ltd., Sanya 572024, China 
 Hainan Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Haikou 571126, China 
 Department of Ecology, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, China 
First page
1266
Publication year
2024
Publication date
2024
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
20771312
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
3098088954
Copyright
© 2024 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.