Estimation of coral reef area from multi-temporal and multi-spectral satellite images: A case study on Lingyang Reef, Xisha Islands

Xiong Yuan; Huang Rongyong; Yu Kefu

doi:10.12284/hyxb2022138

Volume 44 Issue 8

Aug. 2022

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Xiong Yuan，Huang Rongyong，Yu Kefu. Estimation of coral reef area from multi-temporal and multi-spectral satellite images: A case study on Lingyang Reef, Xisha Islands[J]. Haiyang Xuebao，2022, 44(8)：151–168 doi: 10.12284/hyxb2022138

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Estimation of coral reef area from multi-temporal and multi-spectral satellite images: A case study on Lingyang Reef, Xisha Islands

doi: 10.12284/hyxb2022138

Xiong Yuan^{1, 2, 3
,},
Huang Rongyong^{1, 2, 3, 4
,
,},
Yu Kefu^{1, 2, 3, 4}

1.
School of Marine Sciences, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China
2.
Guangxi Laboratory on the Study of Coral Reefs in South China Sea, Nanning 530004, China
3.
Coral Reef Research Centre of China, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China
4.
Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai), Zhuhai 519080, China

Received Date: 2021-12-21
Accepted Date: 2022-03-10
Rev Recd Date: 2022-02-16

Available Online: 2022-08-15

Publish Date: 2022-08-15

Abstract

Abstract

Estimating coral reef area accurately is fundamental for assessing the resource and environmental effects on coral reefs. However, there is little clear agreement on the areas of coral reefs until now. The main reason is that there is lack of a reliable method to estimate the areas of coral reefs. To address this problem, a low-cost semi-automatic method of coral reef area estimation by using multi-temporal and multi-spectral satellite images is proposed in this paper. The method contains extraction of instantaneous boundaries and fusion of the boundaries. Firstly, the boundaries of the coral reef geomorphologic zones are automatically delineated by using gradient vector flow-snake model (GVF-Snake) after roughly locating the positions of the geomorphic zone boundaries. Thereafter, the extracted multi-temporal geomorphic zone boundaries are converted to geomorphic zone areas and then fused to establish a reliable and accurate geomorphic zone. According to our experiments on the 53 images of Sentinel-2 MSI (the Landsat 8 OLI images are used to verify method stability, the area of Ling Yang Reef is 17.29 km²), the area of Ling Yang Reef is 17.22 km², among which the areas of the front reef slope, the reef flat-lagoon slope, and the lagoon are 1.76 km², 10.29 km², and 5.17 km², respectively. The results are consistent with in-field survey data. Specifically, the differences between the positions of the geomorphic zone boundaries extracted by using the proposed method and those determined by bathymetric data are in the range of 0.2−4.9 m (less than 0.5 pixel of Sentinel-2 MSI images). The differences between the outline of the coral reef and the 30 m isobath line is also within 1 pixel (5.7−9.5 m). The difference between the area extracted from multi-temporal images by using the proposed method and the area determined by using a high-resolution WorldView-2 image is 0.02%, i.e. Coral reef area calculated from multi-temporal Sentinel-2 MSI images by using our method is able to compete to high-resolution WorldView-2 image in accuracy. Furthermore, the complete, the correction, and the quality of the boundaries are improved from 60%, 64%, and 54% for single-image method to 84%, 83%, and 72% for our multi-temporal method, respectively. Besides, the proposed method can also reduce variations of the estimated coral reef area caused by using satellite images with different sensors. In other word, if more than 6 scenes of satellite images was utilized, the standard deviations of the estimated coral reef area are shown to be less than 0.01 km² and 0.05 km² respectively for Sentinel-2 MSI and Landsat 8 OLI images. They are only equivalent to 0.2% and 0.5% of the total coral reef area. In summary, the proposed method is accurate, reliable, and stable for coral reef area estimation.
- coral reef,
- satellite images,
- area estimation,
- Sentinel-2,
- gradient vector flow-snake (GVF-Snake),
- multi-temporal images

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References(48)

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