Development of segmentation algorithm for determining planktonic objects from microscopic images

Plankton are free-floating organisms that live, grow, and move along with the ocean currents. This free-floating organism plays important roles as primary producers, they serve as a link to energy transfer, and a factor that regulates the biogeochemical cycles. Indonesia, with almost 60% of its territory covered by the ocean, harbours a wide variety of planktonic species. However, one of the issues within usual planktonic studies is the lack of a fast and accurate method for identifying and classifying the plankton type. Thus, the computer vision methods on microscopic images were proposed to deal with the problem. The classification follows two main steps, detecting plankton location and followed by plankton differentiation. The segmentation algorithm is required to limit the determination area. The present study describes the segmentation methods on fifteen plankton types. The U-Net based architecture was implemented to segment the plankton texture from other objects. The segmentation result was also compared with the manual assessment to compute the performance parameters. The accuracy, 0.970±0.025, gives the highest value whereas the smallest value is found in the precision parameter, 0.761±0.156.