Image processing and identification technology of PlanktonScope passes Ministry of Science and Technology inspection and approval at Qingdao, China. 

Scene of meeting

PlanktonScope was developed by Tsinghua SIGS as a result of the "Marine Plankton Imaging System for In-situ Monitoring Development and Optimization” project under the National Key R&D Program for marine environment security. The approved imaging technology that is used to identify and enumerate marine planktons not only has good self-learning abilities, but can also be flexibly applied to a variety of marine environments. This technology has helped collect an in situ plankton feature library of South China Sea, Yellow Sea, East China Sea, Shenzhen Bay, Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay and other offshore sea areas.

Organized by the Ministry of Science and Technology and undertaken by the Institute of Oceanology, experts at the inspection came from the Ocean University of China, Xiamen University, the National Center for Ocean Standards and Metrology, and China Metallurgical Engineering Co., Ltd. After understanding the overall progress of the project and seeing results from the South China Sea trial, the team displayed in-situ plankton images obtained during the “Tan Suo Yi Hao” voyage in the South China Sea in August 2019. Experts fully affirmed the technology’s image processing and feature expression ability, classification and recognition accuracy, and approved the technology at inspection.

PlanktonScope can be used for in situ monitoring and intelligent identification of various dominant plankton such as copepods, medusae, chaetognath, fish larvae and noctiluca. It has good application prospects in marine ecological management, and can provide forecasts and early warnings for potential ecological disaster. 

In situ plankton image taken at the South China Sea (left) and after automatic classification and recognition result using PlanktonScope's imaging technology (right)

Examples of plankton images taken by PlanktonScope

Article by Cheng Kaichang

Photo by Ying Kezhen

Edited by Karen Lee