Classification of algae in watersheds using elastic shape

Identifying algae in water is important for managing algal blooms which have great impact on drinking water supply systems. There have been various microscopic approaches developed for algae classification. Many of them are based on the morphological features of algae. However, there have seldom been mathematical frameworks for comparing the shape of algae, represented as a planar continuous curve obtained from an image. In this work, we describe a recent framework for computing shape distance between two different algae based on the elastic metric and a novel functional representation called the square root velocity function (SRVF). We further introduce statistical procedures for multiple shapes of algae including computing the sample mean, the sample covariance, and performing the principal component analysis (PCA). Based on the shape distance, we classify six algal species in watersheds experiencing algal blooms, including three cyanobacteria (Microcystis, Oscillatoria, and Anabaena), two diatoms (Fragilaria and Synedra), and one green algae (Pediastrum). We provide and compare the classification performance of various distance-based and model-based methods. We additionally compare elastic shape distance to non-elastic distance using the nearest neighbor classifiers.