Visual rhythm-based plankton detection method for ballast water quality assessment

The ballast water transported by commercial ships is one of the major un-natural means of species dispersal in aquatic ecosystems. An important technological challenge for monitoring ballast water standards concerns the establishment of analytical techniques that generate reliable results on organisms concentration, size and viability quickly and without the need for intensive manual work of specialists. Moreover, an automatic monitoring system must be able to store and analyze possibly large databases (hours of videos acquired with high frame rate and high resolution digital cameras). In the present paper, a new image analysis method for ballast water monitoring is presented. The main objective was to detect and count planktonic microorganisms using the Visual Rhythm of the video records during ballast water discharges. The results prove the efficacy of the proposed approach in the analysis of long movie sequences.