Last month we had a successful inter-calibration cruise with our zooplankton imaging system ZOOPS. We configured the system to record simultaneous stereo images and broadband acoustic reflections from individual zooplankton. After two days of hard work we had over 40,000 image pairs and acoustic reflections. We are now sifting through the data to find records where the animal was in both camera images and the acoustic beam at the same time. We plan to use these to better understand the relationship between taxa, size, shape, and orientation of the animals and their acoustic scattering signatures.
Tara Knight documented the entire cruise with video and still images including the image shown above.
Some examples of the of data we were looking for are shown below. Each image gives a roughly orthogonal view of the animal being insonified while the matched filtered acoustic envelope (the red curve below the left image) shows the scattering strength and range of the animal. We hope to estimate the size and orientation of the animals from the image data and then compare the measured acoustic data to well-established scattering models.
