Ultra low power underwater camera extends coral reef monitoring time
CoraLive: Ultra-Low-Power Underwater Vision for Long-term Coral Reef Monitoring
Networking and Internet Architecture
Summary
Protecting coral reefs requires watching them for a long time, but existing cameras run out of battery fast or need a lot of human help. The authors show a new underwater camera system that uses less power by taking lots of simple pictures but only a few detailed ones. It sends less data to shore by saving only what’s important, letting computers there do the heavy work. This way, the camera can last months much longer while still capturing useful information about the reefs.
What this means in practice
- •For marine conservation teams: Deploy continuous underwater cameras that last months longer for coral reef health monitoring without frequent maintenance.
- •For environmental monitoring device manufacturers: Build energy-efficient underwater cameras that reduce data storage needs and extend operation time for ecological surveying.$Commercial implications: Enables production of long-lasting underwater cameras with optimized data processing for customers engaged in environmental monitoring.
Authors
Sitong Shen, Chenshu Wu
Abstract
Effective coral reef protection and restoration demands continuous, long-term underwater monitoring. However, current solutions largely rely on fragmented, manual labor and costly infrastructure, or are severely limited by constrained battery lifespans. In this paper, we present CoraLive, an ultra-low-power underwater camera system for long-term, continuous coral reef monitoring. CoraLive presents a decoupled underwater-shore co-design that minimizes on-board computation and storage, offloading heavy reconstruction and segmentation tasks to offline shore-side processing. To achieve this, CoraLive introduces a dual-rate sensing scheme combining frequent low-resolution frames with sparse high-fidelity samples and a content-adaptive update mechanism that extracts and stores only compact, task-specific data, eliminating the need to save raw video frames. We implement CoraLive on a custom STM32U575-based dual-camera prototype with device-level computation and storage optimization. Compared with raw recording, CoraLive reduces daily storage by $4.51\times$ and average power by $7.78\times$, extending battery lifetime from 20.4 to 159.5~days while retaining high-accuracy segmentation and reconstruction. Further validated in a real-world underwater deployment, we envision CoraLive as a pioneering step for ubiquitous long-term coral reef underwater monitoring.