Detecting submerged aquatic vegetation with 8-band WorldView-2 satellite images

In this paper, we investigate the effects of water turbidity and water depth on the task of detecting submerged aquatic vegetation, such as seagrass, using WorldView-2 satellite images. We computed the reflectance spectra of submerged aquatic vegetation using a shallow water reflectance model for various water depth, water turbidity and benthic vegetation cover fraction on sandy substrate. The computed spectra were added with noise and used in a inverse modeling algorithm for retrieving the water depth, optical properties and water column corrected sea bottom reflectance. For low turbidity water (up to 25 NTU), the retrieved water column corrected NDVI values correlate very well with the vegetation cover fraction.