Video-Based Real Time Analysis of Plankton Particle Size Spectrum

Plankton is one of the most basic components in the marine ecosystem. The community structure and population change of plankton are the important ecological information to reflect the environmental situation. As the fundamental parameter of the plankton community structure, size spectrum is very useful for the evaluation of the marine ecosystem. In this paper, we propose a real-time and adaptive algorithm to calculate the size spectrum of underwater plankton video, which is captured by the high-resolution and high-speed optical camera. First, this algorithm screens the high-resolution plankton images to ensure that every plankton is counted once with the clearest frame. Second, edge detection and morphological methods are performed to get plankton areas. Furthermore, we perform several simplifications that each particle is handled as ellipses shape to calculate the volume to obtain the size spectrum. Moreover, in order to facilitate the biologists to research plankton deeply, we record a region of the clear area containing each plankton to build a plankton database.