Development of a machine learning technique for automatic analysis of seafloor image data: Case example, Pogonophora coverage at mud volcanoes

Digital image processing provides powerful tools for fast and precise analysis of large image data sets in marine and geoscientific applications. Because of the increasing volume of georeferenced image and video data acquired by underwater platforms such as remotely operated vehicles, means of automatic analysis of the acquired image data are required. A new and fast-developing application is the combination of video imagery and mosaicking techniques for seafloor habitat mapping. In this article we introduce an approach to fully automatic detection and quantification of Pogonophora coverage in seafloor video mosaics from mud volcanoes. The automatic recognition is based on textural image features extracted from the raw image data and classification using machine learning techniques. Classification rates of up to 98.86% were achieved on the training data. The approach was extensively validated on a data set of more than 4000 seafloor video mosaics from the Hهkon Mosby Mud Volcano.