New camera tech reveals underwater ecosystems from above

But one person can only see so much coral in a dive. What if you wanted to assess coral over an entire region or see how reefs are faring on a global scale?

Enter Ved Chirayath of NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California. He has developed a new hardware and software technique called fluid lensing that can see clearly through the moving water to image reefs.

Imagine you're looking at something sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool. If no swimmers are around and the water is still, you can easily see it. But if someone dives in the water and makes waves, that object becomes distorted. You can't easily distinguish its size or shape.

Ocean waves do the same thing, even in the clearest of tropical waters. Fluid lensing software strips away that distortion so that researchers can easily see corals at centimeter resolution. These image data can be used to discern branching from mounding coral types and healthy coral from those that are sick or dying. They can also be used to identify sandy or rocky material.

So far Fluid Cam, the imaging instrument that carries the fluid lensing software, has flown only on a drone. Someday, this technique could be flown on an orbiting spacecraft to gather image data on the world's reefs.

That amount of data would be painstaking to sort through to look for specific coral attributes. So Chirayath's team is cataloging the data they've collected and are adding it to a database to train a supercomputer to rapidly sort the data into known types - a process called machine learning.

Because of the technology developments in both the tools to collect the data and the machine learning techniques to rapidly assess the data, coral researchers are a step closer to having more Earth observations to help them understand our planet's reefs.