Planktwin: a 3D Scanning System for Volumetric Reconstruction of Live Marine Plankton Using Synchronized High-Speed Macro Cameras

durch Veit Dausmann (GEOMAR FB2 deepsea plankton and imaging)

Mittwoch 21.01.2026, 13:15 → 14:30 Europe/Berlin

5-1.213 - PAZIFIK / PACIFIC- Rechte Seite - Großer, unterteilbarer Konferenzraum (GEOMAR - Standort Ostufer / GEOMAR - East Shore)

Abstract:

Marine Plankton is central to carbon cycling and food webs. Advances in imaging methods have opened new opportunities for their study in the last decades. However, no widely available, operational plankton 3D scanner based on conventional optical imaging exists. We then present an imaging system that employs four synchronized, high‑speed macro cameras arranged in a mutually orthogonal geometry to capture sequences of dark‑field images of live plankton in water‑filled cuvettes. We describe the hardware setup/design, image acquisition and calibration in detail and introduce a recently developed volumetric reconstruction technique based on inverse ray‑tracing to reconstruct sequences of 3D models for each point in time during the recording. We present scans of four plankton species from which moving 3D models with multiple novel views could be deducted. The effective biovolume of the living plankton samples can be calculated achieving a higher accuracy than the currently widely applied methods (deduction of biovolume from equivalent spherical diameter).