Environmental damage has been of much concern, particularly coastal areas and the oceans given climate change and drastic effects of pollution and extreme climate events. Our present day analytical capabilities along with the advancements in information acquisition techniques such as remote sensing can be utilized for the management and study of coral reef ecosystems. In this paper, we present Reef-insight, an unsupervised machine learning framework that features advanced clustering methods and remote sensing for reef community mapping. Our framework compares different clustering methods to evaluate them for reef community mapping using remote sensing data. We evaluate four major clustering approaches such as k- means, hierarchical clustering, Gaussian mixture model, and density-based clustering based on qualitative and visual assessment. We utilise remote sensing data featuring Heron reef island region in the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. Our results indicate that clustering methods using remote sensing data can well identify benthic and geomorphic clusters that are found in reefs when compared to other studies. Our results indicate that Reef-insight can generate detailed reef community maps outlining distinct reef habitats and has the potential to enable further insights for reef restoration projects. We release our framework as open source software to enable its extension to different parts of the world

本研究采用无人监督机器学习框架Reef-insight，并结合遥感数据进行珊瑚礁生态系统管理和研究，结果表明该框架可以生成详细的礁石和地貌聚类，有助于珊瑚礁生态环境的修复项目。

Reef-insight: 利用聚类方法和遥感技术的珊瑚礁栖息地制图框架