The Bathymetry- and Reflectivity-based Estimator of Seafloor Segments (BRESS) provides a robust and flexible technique to segment seafloor acoustic mapping data by analyzing co-located bathymetric digital elevation models and acoustic backscatter mosaics.
Principles of topographic openness, pattern recognition, and texture classification are used to identify geomorphic elements of the seafloor or “area kernels”, then the final seafloor segmentation is derived by merging or splitting the kernels based on similarity and multi-modality.
The output is a collection of homogeneous, non-overlapping seafloor segments of consistent morphology and acoustic backscatter texture.
Each labeled segment is enriched by a list of derived, physically-meaningful attributes that can be used for task-specific analysis.
