Extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and magnitude. Consequently, it is important to understand their effects and remediation. We studied the impact of a powerful storm on coral reef structural complexity using novel computational tools and detailed 3D reconstructions captured at seven sites in three time-points over three years. We employed six geometrical metrics, two of which are new algorithms for calculating fractal-dimension of reefs in full 3D. Three metrics showed a significant difference between time-points, i.e., decline and subsequent recovery in structural complexity. We also explored the changes in fractal dimension per size category and found a similar trend. A multivariate analysis helped us to reveal which sites were affected the most and their relative recovery. The full picture suggests that the reef has not gone through a phase-shift and is returning to its prior state w.r.t. structural complexity.
Figure 1. Burst denoising in challenging real-world low-light scenes. The dark burst images, scaled before processing, contain high levels of noise and significant camera motion that can be seen in their averages. The results of both BPN [31] and DeepRep [1] are generally more blurry and lack detail compared to those of NAN, the proposed method. Blue rectangles mark a clear example for comparison. Green and yellow ellipses show artifacts and missing detail correspondingly in competitor results. The reader is encouraged to zoom-in.
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