DiatomNet: An automatic Diatom genus identification system through microscopic images and Deep Learning

Abstract

Diatoms are microscopic organisms belonging to the algae kingdom. They adapt to the ecosystem and modify their shape and texture depending on hundreds of ecosystem variables. Hence, these micro-organism are considered as the most accurate indicator to measure water quality. Commonly, the recognition of the class of diatoms in a microscopic image has always been done by expert biologists knowledgeable about the morphometric characteristics of these organisms. This work proposes a new automatic diatom genus recognition system from microscopic images using state-of-the-art deep CNNs. In particular, 1) we developed a public high quality database organized into 44 genus-level diatom classes, 2) designed a robust diatom classification model, and 3) provided a user-friendly interface to utilize our automatic diatom recognition tool.