Counting Harmful Aquatic Organisms in Ballast Water through Image Processing

Abstract

Ballast water provides stability and manoeuvrability to a ship. Foreign harmful aquatic organisms, which were transferred by ballast water, cause disturbing ecosystem. In order to minimize transference of foreign harmful aquatic organisms, IMO(International Maritime Organization) adopted the International Convention for the Control and Management of Ship’s Ballast Water and Sediments in 2004. If the convention take Received (January 8, 2016), Review Result (January 22, 2016) Accepted (January 29, 2016), Published (March 31, 2016) 139-701 Dept. Embedded Software Engineering, Kwangwoon Univ., 20 Kwangwoon-ro , Nowon-gu, Seoul, Korea email: onlyred@kw.ac.kr 152-865 No.1503, Korea Oceanic and Atmospheric SystemTechnology, 90 Gyeongin-ro 53-gil, Guro-gu, Seoul, Korea email: poseidon@koast.net (Corresponding Author) 139-701 Dept. Computer Science, Kwangwoon Univ., 20 Kwangwoon-ro, Nowon-gu, Seoul, Korea email: yhdfly@kw.ac.kr * 이 논문은 2015년도 정부(교육부)의 재원으로 한국연구재단의 지원을 받아 수행된 기초연구사업임(No. 2015R1D1A1A01060105) Counting Harmful Aquatic Organisms in Ballast Water through Image Processing Copyright c 2016 HSST 384 effect, a port authority might need to check that ballast water is properly disposed of. In this paper, we propose a method of counting harmful aquatic organisms in ballast water thorough image processing. We extracted three samples from the ballast water that had been collected at Busan port in Korea. Then we made three grey-scale images from each sample as experimental data. We made a comparison between the proposed method and CellProfiler which is a well known cell-counting program based on image processing. Setting of CellProfiler is empirically chosen from the result of cell count by an expert. After finding a proper threshold for each image at which the result is similar to that of CellProfiler, we used the average value as the final threshold. Our experimental results showed that the proposed method is simple but about ten times faster than CellProfiler without loss of the output quality.