Detecting P. minimum cells in phytoplankton images

This article is concerned with detection of objects in phytoplankton images, especially objects representing one invasive species-Prorocentrum minimum (P. minimum), - which is known to cause harmful blooms in many estuarine and coastal environments. A new technique, combining phase congruency-based detection of circular objects, stochastic optimization, and image segmentation was developed for solving the task. The developed algorithms were tested using 114 images of 1280x960 pixels size recorded by a colour camera. There were 2088 objects representing P. minimum cells in the images in total. The algorithms were able to detect 93,25% of the objects. The results are rather encouraging and may be applied for future development of the algorithms aimed at automated classification of objects into classes representing different phytoplankton species.