Monitoring abnormalities in UAE's seawater using image Processing algorithms

Abstract

Ammar Saif Almuhairi, Monitoring Abnormalities in UAE′s Seawater Using Image Processing Algorithms, M.Sc. Thesis, M.Sc. by Research, Department of Communication Engineering, Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research, United Arab Emirates, January 2011. The GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) countries lack adequate freshwater availability. Hence, most of the fresh water is obtained from seawater desalination. Because seawater is the main source of fresh water and can be polluted by human and non human activities, it needs to be continuously protected and monitored. This project deals with monitoring of pollution caused by desalination plants and red-tide which are the most worrying seawater issues in the UAE. In this project, different approaches were implemented on remote sensing data using MATLAB and ENVI/IDL to monitor the water quality in the UAE coastal areas and detect abnormalities. Both visible and thermal measurements provided by MODIS (MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer) sensors, which are passive remote sensors that detect natural energy emitted or reflected by the observed object, are used in this project. Water quality parameters of interest include chlorophyll concentration (chl), temperature, colour, turbidity and total suspended matter (TSM). High resolution multi-spectral data from the newly launched satellite DubaiSat-1 (DS-1) were used to detect small changes in water colour that cannot be detected with the MODIS data (250 m). For desalination plants, it is too difficult to monitor the pollution with the low spatial resolution of MODIS. With DS-1 images, SSIM (Structural SIMilarity) and reflectance ratio provided promising results in detecting abnormalities surrounding the desalination plants. Red tide was detected using different techniques, the best one being FLH (Fluorescence Line Height)-based technique.

Date of Award	2011
Original language	American English
Supervisor	Hussain Al Ahmad (Supervisor)