Finding Whales in Ocean Water: Edge Detection, Blob Processing, and RGB Channels in C#

A Visual Studio 2013 demo project including all of the code in this article can be downloaded using the links in the resources section below. I was recently tasked with trying to isolate whales within an image of ocean water using C#. While building machine learning models, the question was raised: "Does ocean water add noise in a model to detect a specific whale while it is swimming in the ocean?" This was the primary question posed. However, before it could be studied, a method was needed to isolate various whales within many images of ocean water.