Remote identification of a shipwreck site from MBES backscatter

TitleRemote identification of a shipwreck site from MBES backscatter
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year2012
AuthorsMasetti, G, Calder, BR
JournalJournal of Environmental Management
Volume111
Pages44-52
Date Published30 November 2012
PublisherElsevier
Place Publishedhttp://ees.elsevier.com/jema/
KeywordsMultibeam Sonars, Seafloor Characterization

The method described attempts to remotely identify the shape of an anthropogenic object, such as a wreck of a modern vessel, using reflectivity data from Multi-Beam Echosounder (MBES) systems. In the beam domain, the backscatter strength values – geometrically and radiometrically corrected – are used to extract a large number of Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) features with different input parameters. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is applied in order to achieve dimensionality reduction whilst a K-means algorithm clusters as “shipwreck site” a large number of beams for each line. After the geo-referencing process, a K-nearest-neighbors (K-NN) technique is applied as a filter for possible misclassifications. Finally, the shape of the shipwreck site is defined from the georeferenced beams using the α-shape method, constructing an output compatible with Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

Publication Linkhttp://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479712003520