Plankton Identifer

Author : Dr Stéphane Gasparini; Laboratoire d'Océanographie de Villefranche; UMR 7093 - CNRS / Université Pierre et Marie Curie

Plankton Identifier is a free software which allows the automatic identification of objects (plankton and/or particles) from a set of images with their associated data. Therefore, before you can use Plankton Identifier, you must extract object data (PID format) and object thumbnails (JPEG format) with a dedicated hardware-software combination such as ZooScan and ZooProcess (http://www.ZooScan.com).

Once data acquisition is done, Plankton Identifier helps the user to build a Learning File (set of objects identified by an expert) through a safe interface which prevents from data loss, erroneous duplicates etc. Then, using the learning file, Plankton Identifier allows the automatic recognition of an unlimited number of objects from one or several data files. Additionally, the user can optimize the recognition by many ways (by choice of different data analysis methods, selection of variables, variable transformation, way of grouping objects etc.). Results are stored in one or several text files which can easily be imported in other softwares (for graphics, time series analysis etc...). A detailed statistical report is also generated (html format allowing copy-paste).

NOTE: Although Plankton Identifier has been initially developed to identify Planktonic organisms, it can virtually identify any kind of objects.

Supervised learning algorithms are not implemented in Plankton Identifier itself but are those of the free data mining software TANAGRA which is used in batch mode. This is the reason why you must install Tanagra 1.4.22 or above on your computer before using Plankton Identifier.

TANAGRA can be downloaded here.

NOTE: Experimented users can define their own data analysis methods for Plankton Identifier using Tanagra tdm format.