TY - BOOK AU - Bala Naga Jyothi Vandavasi TI - AI-based channel infused coral identification and tracking algorithm for autonomous underwater vehicles KW - Artificial intelligence, KW - detection KW - autonomous underwater vehicle KW - coral KW - tracking N2 - Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) equipped with in-situ artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled image processing capability could help understand the influence of climate change on reef ecology, and evolve wellinformed policy decisions for sustaining coral reefs. The recent focus is on developing technologies to collect images of coral reefs autonomously over larger areas using AUVs with AI-aided image processing capabilities. This article presents the development of a computer vision and deep-learning-based coral identification and tracking algorithm trained on six distinct families of coral images acquired from the Andaman Islands using a remotely operated vehicle PROVe500 developed by the National Institute of Ocean Technology, Chennai. The YOLOv8-trained coral detection and classification model, along with the ByteTrack, have been used to identify and track the corals with mean average precision and recall rates of 97.4% and 96.8% respectively. The developed AI algorithm gives confidence in deploying AUVs to identify and track corals of interest or anomalies in real-time over a large spatial domain ER -