arXiv subjects

F. Mikaela Nordborg

Publications and source records attributed to F. Mikaela Nordborg.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Coral Grow-out Robotic Assessment System (CGRAS): Scaling Coral Recruit Monitoring Through Robotics and Computer Vision

Climate change is the largest threat to coral reefs, with increasing global impacts accelerating the need for scalable reef restoration technologies. Large-scale reef restoration depends on the mass production of corals, such as through coral aquaculture. Coral seeding with recruits grown in aquaculture facilities is a feasible restoration approach, but effective production requires consistent, high-frequency monitoring of tens of thousands of macroscopic (0.5-2mm diameter) recruits, making conventional manual assessment prohibitively labor-intensive. To address this monitoring bottleneck, we introduce the Coral Grow-out Robotic Assessment System (CGRAS) which combines robotic imaging and computer vision to automate data acquisition, perform multi-species detection and counting of corals, and evaluate coral health. CGRAS automatically extracts coral growth, survival and spatial distribution metrics, with the aim of providing timely feedback to operators for optimizing production, grow-out and deployment workflow processes. We demonstrate CGRAS in a large aquaculture facility on standardized coral settlement tiles, reducing the time and labor costs by a factor of 9.6 as compared to manual monitoring, whilst achieving 96.4% agreement for Acropora kenti corals relative to expert counts.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Automated Coral Spawn Monitoring for Reef Restoration: The Coral Spawn and Larvae Imaging Camera System (CSLICS)

Coral aquaculture for reef restoration requires accurate and continuous spawn counting for resource distribution and larval health monitoring, but current methods are labor-intensive and represent a critical bottleneck in the coral production pipeline. We propose the Coral Spawn and Larvae Imaging Camera System (CSLICS), which uses low cost modular cameras and object detectors trained using human-in-the-loop labeling approaches for automated spawn counting in larval rearing tanks. This paper details the system engineering, dataset collection, and computer vision techniques to detect, classify and count coral spawn. Experimental results from mass spawning events demonstrate an F1 score of 82.4% for surface spawn detection at different embryogenesis stages, 65.3% F1 score for sub-surface spawn detection, and a saving of 5,720 hours of labor per spawning event compared to manual sampling methods at the same frequency. Comparison of manual counts with CSLICS monitoring during a mass coral spawning event on the Great Barrier Reef demonstrates CSLICS' accurate measurement of fertilization success and sub-surface spawn counts. These findings enhance the coral aquaculture process and enable upscaling of coral reef restoration efforts to address climate change threats facing ecosystems like the Great Barrier Reef.

cs.RO↗