Large-area mosaics

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For several years we have been slowly building capability to make mosaics over larger areas. Examples include:

• Palmyra longliner grounding in 2013,2014
• Carysfort Reef, FL, in 2017
• South of Big Pine Key, FL, in 20 17
• Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in 2019

Historical progress by our team in producing large-area mosaics is summarized in the table below. Processing has become faster and spatial resolution has increased over time as computers have improved. Depth reconstruction (2.5-D processing) has also become feasible recently. The total number of images that can be processed remains a bottleneck, however, even with reasonably powerful computing clusters (64 CPU, 320 GB RAM used for the Flower Gardens dataset). Processing larger areas than these, at higher spatial resolution and in less time, will require new approaches to managing, subdividing, and assembling overlapping datasets.