We use a feedforward backpropagation neural network to classify close-up images of coral reef components into three benthic categories: living coral, dead coral and sand. We have achieved a success rate of 86.5% (false positive = 6.7%) for test images that were not in the training set which is high considering that corals occur in an immense variety of appearance. Color and texture features derived from video stills of coral reef transects from the Great Barrier Reef were used as inputs to the network. We also developed a rule-based decision tree classifier according to how marine scientists classify corals from texture and color, and obtained a lower recognition rate of 79.7% for the same set of images.