CoraLive: Ultra-Low-Power Underwater Vision for Long-term Coral Reef Monitoring

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.