LMI Seminar: Why are there colors in the ocean?

Abstract:

The shallow benthic ocean is full of colorful organisms—what do their colors mean?

Are more colorful habitats more biodiverse? Like the ocean color being used to estimate phytoplankton pigments and primary productivity, can benthic colors also give us insights regarding productivity?

Their potential roles have not yet been systematically explored because, until recently, we could not capture benthic colors objectively and repeatably due to our inability to compensate for the obscuring effects of water in underwater photographs. Recent developments in underwater computer vision - some of them at my laboratory - have now enabled us to do so. In this talk, I will walk you through the principles of image formation underwater, explain why it is so difficult to capture colors consistently underwater, and how we can get around those difficulties to use color as reproducible scientific data.