The taxonomic identification of diatom species that constituted phytoplankton communities in remote times is determined in several research fields like ecology, evolution, paleocology and biostratigraphy. In the last 30 years the use of fossil diatoms like environmental indicators has become of prime importance. However the use of these organisms is limited since they are found in sediment samples mostly fragmented or pulverized. This may lead to confusion and loss of information. In this work we used invariant correlation to identify 21 species of fossil diatoms. This correlation method is invariant to position, scale and rotation of the image. With this method we were able to identify the diatom species from only a small fragment of the organisms. Results showed that it is possible to identify some species having a range since 2.12% of information of the image. For example the minimum percentage was for Azpeitia nodulifer var A. This methodology can be used for the development of an automated system of plankton identification. An automatized identification of diatoms would be able to guarantee a faster identification and also would reduce the time necessary for accomplishing analysis of samples highly fragmengted.

Date Published: 21 November 2002
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 4790, Applications of Digital Image Processing XXV, (21 November 2002); doi: 10.1117/12.452180

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 4790:
Applications of Digital Image Processing XXV
Andrew G. Tescher, Editor(s)