The ZooSCAN (CNRS patent) system makes use of scanner technology with custom lighting and a watertight scanning chamber into which liquid zooplankton samples can be placed. The scanner recovers a high-resolution, digitial image and the sample can be recovered without damage. (You can download an example image exactly as it was recovered here.) These digital images can then be investigated by computer processing.While the resolution of the digitized zooplankton images is lower than the image obtained using a binocular microscope this technique has proved to be more than adequate for large sample sets. Identification of species is done by automatic comparison of the image (vignette) of each individual animal in the scanned image with a library data set which may be built by the investigator for each individual survey or imported from a previous survey. The latest machine learning algorithm allows high recognition levels even if we recommend complementary manual sorting to achieve a high number of taxonomic groups (see JPR ZooSCAN article.)