Quantification of bioirrigation using image analysis

Abstract

The presence of benthic macrofauna affects many sediment characteristics, including the structure of the sediment matrix and the transport of dissolved chemical constituents and their exchange between the benthos and the overlying water. To quantify the advective flow in the subsurface induced by benthic macrofauna as a series of high-resolution images from an experiment with an acrylic antfarm were used, where the fluorescent tracer fluorescein was added and its distribution in the sediment – caused by pumping of the arenicolid worm - was captured. Horn-Schunck, Lucas-Kanade, Cross-Correlation + Lucas-Kanade and Edge tracking methods are used to obtain the optical flow from sequence of images. The optical flow directions and magnitude obtained using the above methods are compared to the flow direction magnitude reported in literature.