Finding essential features for tracking starfish in a video sequence

The paper introduces a software system for detecting and tracking starfish in an underwater video sequence. The target of such a system is to help biologists in giving an estimate of the number of starfish present in a particular area of the sea-bottom. The nature of the input images is characterised by a low signal/noise ratio and by the presence of noisy background represented by pebbles; this makes the detection a non-trivial task. The procedure we use is a chain of several steps that starts from the extraction of the area of interest and ends with a classifier and a tracker providing the necessary information for counting the starfish present in the scene.