Notícias

Talk - ''Autonomous Benthic Monitoring in Australia''

June 3rd | 3 p.m. | Room I -105 DEEC | FEUP

The Australian Centre for Field Robotics has operated Australia's Integrated Marine Observing  system (IMOS) AUV facility for over eight years. This facility supports the IMOS benthic monitoring program, which has identified sites on temperate and tropical reefs around Australia for optical imaging once a year or every other year. This observing program capitalizes on the unique capabilities of AUVs that have allowed repeated visits to the

reference sites, will providing an observational link between oceanographic and benthic processes. Since 2010 benthic reference sites have been revisited in Western Australia, Tasmania, Queensland and New South Wales in collaboration with research groups from universities and federal and state agencies.

We briefly cover the relevant capabilities of the AUV facility, the design of the IMOS benthic sampling program, results from the surveys around Australia, as well as key finding from an end-user based review of operations. We also report on some of the challenges and potential benefits to be realized from a benthic observation system that collects several TB of geo-referenced stereo imagery a year. These includes semi-automated image analysis and classification, visualization and data mining, and change detection and characterisation. We also discuss the design of an enhanced monitoring system that lowers shiptime requirements while increasing reliability, as well as research to improve underwater imaging and simplified survey methods for wider use of these tools.

 Short bio:

Oscar Pizarro is a principal research fellow at the University of Sydney's Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR). He trained as an oceanographic engineer in the MIT/WHOI Joint  program, specialising in underwater imaging from robotic platforms. Oscar moved to Australia in 2005 to help start the marine robotics group at the ACFR. For the last ten years, this group has operated the AUV facility for Australia's Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), charged with monitoring reference sites around the country. This is the world's first robot-based benthic monitoring program, able to precisely revisit the same areas and collect high-quality benthic imagery. This growing nation-wide data set already contains over five million geo-referenced stereo images and is providing scientists with new ways of observing changes in marine habitats.

Oscar is currently interested in developing better tools for quantitative understanding of benthic environments. Given the vast size of our oceans and the difficulties of studying them with traditional approaches, Oscar is investigating using robotics and machine learning to augment human effort and ship capabilities when collecting data in the field, as well as speeding up interpretation of imagery. Such approaches are expected to enable cost-effective techniques for habitat mapping and monitoring that will scale to very large extents.

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