Theses and Dissertations

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Skarke, Adam

Committee Member

Cartwright, John

Committee Member

Meng, Qingmin

Committee Member

Dyer, Jamie L.

Date of Degree

5-12-2023

Document Type

Graduate Thesis - Open Access

Major

Environmental Geoscience

Degree Name

Master of Science (M.S.)

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Department of Geosciences

Abstract

Recent technological advances in unmanned observational platforms, including remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS), have made them highly effective tools for research and monitoring within marine and coastal environments. One of the primary types of data collected by these systems is video imagery, which is often captured at an angle oblique to the Earth’s surface, rather than normal to it (e.g., downward looking). This thesis presents a newly developed suite of tools designed to digitally map oblique imagery data collected with ROV and sUAS in coastal and marine environments and quantitatively evaluates the accuracy of the resultant maps. Results indicate that maps generated from oblique imagery collected with unmanned vehicles have highly variable accuracy relative to maps generated with imagery data collected with conventional mapping platforms. These results suggest that resultant maps have the potential to match or even surpass the accuracy of maps generated with imagery data collected with conventional mapping platforms but realizing that potential is largely dependent upon careful survey design.

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