Robert Kennedy

Publications (2)0 Total impact

• Source

  Available from: Paul F. Whelan

  Article: The application of image processing algorithms to the analysis of SPI images

  Ovidiu Ghita, Paul F. Whelan, Robert Kennedy
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  ABSTRACT: Sediment Profile Imagery is a pollution monitoring technique that is widely used to evaluate whether the marine sediments provide the suitable habitat for benthic fauna. Currently, the SPI data is interpreted by human operators and as a consequence the results are inherently affected by intra and inter observer variability. SPI Analyser is a novel software environment that has been specially designed to perform quantitative measurements on SPI data. The devised software is a collection of automatic and semi-automatic image processing algorithms that are suitable to identify important features present in SPI images. Semi-automatic techniques have been developed to identify features such the sediment water interface or custom segmentation of various image details including burrows and voids. In addition an automatic technique for identification of the oxidised sediments has been devised. The software environment has a user-friendly mouse-driven visual interface that facilitates easy manipulation of the input data and outputs the results in a format that can be easily accessed or modified at any stage. The developed application has been evaluated on a collection of various SPI images and encouraging results have been achieved.
  09/2004;
• Source

  Available from: Paul F. Whelan

  Article: A Practical Approach for Analysing SPI Images

  Ovidiu Ghita, Paul Whelan, Robert Kennedy
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  ABSTRACT: Sediment profile imagery (SPI) is a remote sensing technique that is used for determining whether the marine sediments provide the suitable habitat for benthic (bottom-dwelling) fauna. The SPI technique is based on an inverse periscope that penetrates the seabed and the captured images are analysed in order to evaluate the activity of the resident marine fauna and the overall level of sediment contamination. Although this sediment monitoring technique has been widely used by the marine benthic scientists for several years, SPI analysis is based on a visual qualitative and quantitative evaluation performed by the human operator. Independent tests reveal that this method is affected in terms of sensitivity and reproductibility by the subjectivism of the human operator. This paper describes the development of a color-based image processing technique that is applied to decide if the imaged sediment contains an oxidised layer and to detect its area and position within the image. A number of experimental results are presented and discussed.
  10/2003;