Coral Reef Management in Persian Gulf Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Corals play an important role in the marine environment. The biodiversity of the corals in the Persian Gulf is significant. Therefore, maintaining the health of the corals is very important. Climate change, pathogen factors, oil pollution and urban wastewater have caused problems such as black band, white band and yellow band diseases in the corals. Each of these diseases can change the color and lead to the death of corals. Rapid identification of these diseases can prevent their progression and help to reduce the death of corals. In this study, a coral classification model for early detection of diseased and dying corals is presented. For classification of the corals, the convolutional neural network is used. A dataset of corals from the Persian Gulf is collected for evaluation of the proposed algorithm. The evaluation results show that the proposed model can predict the disease of the corals with accuracy of 95%.