Biodiversity assessment in coral Reef Benthic habitats using hyperspectral images

Hyperspectral images are used to assess biodiversity in a coastal reef with coral species. An algorithm for assessing reef biodiversity in benthic habitats is presented. The method consists of capturing spectral heterogeneity from hyperspectral images using vector quantization (VQ) method and use the result for prediction of benthic species richness. The results are compared with that of Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering (HAC) method. The validation of the process index is done by comparing the Shannon entropy from actual field data and the Shannon entropy computed from the image. The hyperspectral image corresponds to the marine coastal area of Enrique Reef in La Parguera, Puerto Rico which includes all biological communities associated with the sea floor, from the top of the intertidal zone and inner reaches of estuaries down to the deep sea. This work provides fundamental and basic information on benthic habitats for automating the process of marine biodiversity assessment for remote sensing satellite images.