Multiple Plankton Detection and Recognition in Microscopic Images with Homogeneous Clumping and Heterogeneous Interspersion

The analysis of plankton species distribution in sea or fresh water is very important in preserving marine ecosystem health. Since manual analysis is infeasible, many automatic approaches were proposed. They usually use images from in situ towed underwater imaging sensor or specially designed, lab mounted microscopic imaging system. Normally they assume that only single plankton is present in an image so that, if there is a clumping among multiple plankton of same species (homogeneous clumping) or if there are multiple plankton of different species scattered in an image (heterogeneous interspersion), they have a difficulty in recognition. In this work, we propose a deep learning based method that can detect and recognize individual plankton in images with homogeneous clumping, heterogeneous interspersion, or combination of both.