Diffraction pattern applicability in the identification of Ceratium species

Abstract

At present, a subject of great interest for the scientific community is to obtain automatic systems for counting and identifying organisms responsible for red tides. Nevertheless, there are key problems that affect the results in the correct identification and quantification, such as image background (detritus, lighting variation in the microscope), variation in cell sedimentation in the observation field, natural morphological variation of the species in a sample, intra- and interspecific problems, and organism fragmentation. These problems are quantified by means of digital analysis of the phytoplankton organisms' image diffraction patterns. Quantification was accomplished by analyzing the results of the image diffraction pattern correlations and the image correlations. The results showed that the use of diffraction patterns in the identification of six Ceratium species overcomes the numerous noise problems mentioned above.