Determination of water quality in fresh water lakes

Algae can play an important role in both the long and short term determination of water quality in freshwater lakes, reservoirs and rivers. However, the manual identification of these algae can be a time consuming and problematic task. This paper describes an automated computer based system that uses image processing techniques to aid this process. In particular, a comparison is made between different classification techniques. The automated system is able to identify seven species of blue-green algae and two species of green algae