| Abstract | {An underwater serial sectioning tomography technique is shown capable of determining three-dimensional Chlorophyll a (Chl a) microstructure in phytoplankton distributions. The technique involves scanning a 457-nm illumination plane through a range of distances parallel to the imaging plane of a digital CCD camera. Images of induced fluorescence at 685 nm in the sequentially illuminated planes are recorded. A theoretical model of the imaging process in the form of i = In c + Ac + x shows that the image i is a function of a spatially varying c (Chi a) dependent absorption component A and a spatially invariant attenuation component x. A numerical inverse method, incorporating an environmentally dependent calibration constant, is used to calculate Chi a values from the image intensities for three-dimensional presentation. A stable reconstruction, not affected by noise-induced error propagation, is demonstrated.} |
