Development of Marinesnow Analyzing System by using Digital Camera

海洋雪被定义为可见的海洋聚集体（直径大于0.5 mm），并已被认为是上层海洋有机碳转移到深海盆地的重要作用，通过将许多小的有机碎片聚集成足够大的尺寸以下沉。与此同时，海洋雪为深海生物提供有机物质，作为食物网的基础。在不同的机构中，已经有许多尝试将摄像机或偷拍机应用于海洋雪的研究。然而，这些尝试受到了对获得的大量图像数据进行繁琐处理的阻碍。在本研究中，我们利用最新的数码相机和其他技术的优势，开发了紧凑的海洋雪相机系统，它可以使用到6000米的深度。该系统由光源、数码相机和数据处理部分组成，与黄油盒一起组装成紧凑的火焰。在光源方面，我们首次尝试将白色LED光源应用于深海仪器，因为LED光源的黄油消耗远远低于传统的频闪灯。通过将1000多个单光源拼接成一个平板，获得了足够拍摄海洋雪的光强。为了使摄像机获得平行光源，将光板布置成90度。该仪器一次可拍摄约250张照片，足以拍摄主温跃层深度（200- 800 m层）1- 5 m层段深度的照片。该系统利用考察船上的钢丝绳绞车，将数据采集到系统内部的存储器中。在船上恢复系统后，图像数据在30分钟内传输到数据处理系统。将来，在系统的部署期间通过铠装电缆从系统进行数据的真实的实时传输是可能的。

Marine snow is defined as visible marine aggregates (size range more than 0.5mm in diameter) and has been recognized as an important role in the transfer of organic carbon in the upper ocean into deep sea basin through aggregating numerous small organic debris into large size enough for sinking. At the same time, marine snow supplies organic materials to deep-sea organisms as a basis of the food webs. There have been many attempts to apply video-camera or steal-camera for the study of marine snow in various institutions. Those attempts, however, have been hampered by tedious treatment of obtained huge data of pictures. In this study, by taking the advantage of recent advancement of digital camera and other technologies, we developed compact marine snow camera system, which can use down to 6000m depth. The system is composed of light source, digital camera, and data processing portion and all together are assembled into compact flame together with a buttery case. For the light source, we tried to apply white LED light source at the first time deep sea instruments, since buttery consumption of the LED light source is far less than conventional strobe-light. By compiling more than 1000 of single light sources into a flat panel, enough amount of light intensity for photograph of marine snow was obtained. The light panel was arranged to be 90 degree for the camera to get parallel light source. The instrument can accommodate some 250 pictures at the one trip, which is enough to picture 1-5m interval depths at the major thermocline depth (200-800m layers). This system uses the wire-winch on board of research vessel, and collected the data in the memory within the system. After recovery the system on board, the picture data is transferred into data processing system within 30 minutes. In future, real time transfer of data from the system through an armored cable during deploy of the system is possible.