At the 3rd Zooplankton productivity symposium held in 2003 at Gijon in Spain, a case was made for machine vision developers and end users to collaborate to increase the awareness and interest in developing tools for the automatic identification of plankton. A meeting was held for those interested in the ideas. This was built upon at the PICES meeting in 2005 held at San Sebastian, Spain, where the ideas were taken up by many people and a group called RAPID was formed (Research into automatic Plankton IDentification). The concepts formed by this group were presented to Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) working group (WG115) workshop held at Plymouth in 2006. At that meeting it was suggested that a formal proposal to SCOR be made to support a new working group in this field.
This resulted in a proposal being approved by SCOR and WG130 was formed in October 2006. There are 17 full and associate members drawn from across the world. Our first meeting was in Hiroshima 2/3rd June 2007. Phil Culverhouse, vision systems developer and cognition expert from the UK, co-chairs the group with oceanographer Mark Benfield from the United States.
Our terms of reference are to
• To encourage the international co-operation of software developers and marine scientists to use and enhance the open-source development platform, so that a common toolset can be built up over time that is of value to the community
• To evaluate the limits of taxonomic resolution possible from image-based classifiers and develop means of improving the taxonomic resolution that can be achieved from plankton images. The working group will establish a basis for standards in taxonomic reporting by automatic labelling instruments.
• Review existing practices and establish standards in the use of reference image data used for training automation machines and in training people.
• To establish a methodology for inter-comparison/calibration of different visual analysis systems.
• To develop open-source software for application by the marine ecology, taxonomy and systems developers. Publish the products of reviews by members of the Working Group, selected presented papers and workshop reports in an internationally recognised, peer-reviewed journal or a book by a major publisher.
We have four years to complete these tasks, with a modest budget for travel to meetings. We have the support of the biological oceanographic and marine ecology communities and will be submitting funding proposals under the RAPID name, with scientists and engineers drawn from these communities.