Development of a realtime plankton image archiver for AUVs

The goal of this study is to make it possible to measure the distribution of the plankton by using an AUV with a digital microscope camera on the nose. Because of the relatively low performance of the storage device in our AUV, the Regions Of Interest (ROIs) that contain focused plankton' images are extracted from a grabbed image in realtime, and only the ROI images are stored in the onboard memory storage. Thus, the stored data size is much less than that of the whole grabbed images. Moreover, it reduces memory footprint and data bandwidth required for the storage device. For this purpose we have developed a realtime processing board KB-7Z045, the mnemonic name is KRIP. In this paper, the system architecture of the KRIP, the ROI extraction algorithm and their feasibility are described.