Quantitative Imaging Platform of Villefranche sur mer
piqv@imev-mer.fr
The Quantitative Imaging Platform (PIQv) is part of the Institut de la Mer de Villefranche sur mer (IMEV). The platform is also part of EMBRC France and labelled GIS IBISA via the MICA platform.
The PIQv was created by engeeners and researchers from Laboratoire d’Océanographie de Villefranche-sur-Mer (LOV) and keeps being piloted by the COMPLEx team of LOV.
The platform employs taxonomists and instrument/software specialists to offer the best quality of services using laboratory and underwater imaging instrument and software.
The PIQv runs tools permitting to characterize and identify objects/organisms from 20µm to few cm (FlowCam, Zooscan, UVP5 and UVP6). It will soon host the IFCB imaging system permitting to lower the size down to few µm.
Plankton was sampled with various nets, from bottom or 500m depth to the surface, in many oceans of the world. Samples were imaged with a ZooScan. The full images were processed with ZooProcess which generated regions of interest (ROIs) around each individual object and a set of associated features measured on the object (see Gorsky et al 2010 for more information). The same objects were re-processed to compute features with the scikit-image toolbox (http://scikit-image.org). The 1,433,278 resulting objects were sorted by a limited number of operators, following a common taxonomic guide, into 93 taxa, using the web application EcoTaxa (http://ecotaxa.obs-vlfr.fr).
