Remanent Imaging, a novel concept for imaging aquatic organisms
B18 Fellowship Hall
Overview
Abstract
I will present Remanent Imaging ("RI"), an innovative method to record the movement of aquatic organisms, both transparent and opaque. It is currently used to monitor and analyze the behavior of zebrafish—a ubiquitous animal model in medical research—which are transparent in the larval stage.
Standard video captures sequences of sharp, briefly exposed snapshots free of motion blur, at a frame rate that directly constrains time resolution. By contrast, RI records sequences of long exposure images back-to-back to capture motion blur continuously from frame-to-frame. Movement trajectories can be directly extracted from the morphology of individual or stacked sequences of images, at a time resolution that depends on movement amplitude and sensor pixel resolution.
I will show actual zebrafish darkfield illuminated RI sequences as well as how the technique can record aquatic organisms ranging in size from 0.1 to 50 mm and yield orders of magnitude improvements in computational performance and data efficiency.
I will also discuss how to create darkfield conditions and how to apply RI to process control.
Biography
Pierre Martineau is the founder and CEO of Martineau & Associates, Inc., based in California. The company designs computer vision systems of a new kind to monitor and analyse the behavior of aquatic organisms. These computer vision systems, which include hardware (MagnaTank™ and CanaryTank™) and software (PiscisTrack™) leverage Remanent Imaging, a novel video imaging paradigm that records motion blur for improving motion detection and analysis at massively reduced computational loads and data storage footprint. Martineau conceived Remanent Imaging as he tackled the notoriously challenging problem of video monitoring groups of transparent zebrafish larvae in a Petri dish. Martineau grew up in France where he received his academic education from École Polytechnique (B.S.) and Sorbonne University Pierre and Marie Curie (Ph.D.), with focus in Math, Physics, Computer Science, and Life Science Complexity.