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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
The growth and maintenance of bacteria on agar plates (Petri dishes) has long
been a common practice in microbiology. The number of colonies in a culture is usually
counted manually to calculate the concentration of bacteria, however, this process is
time-consuming, tedious and error prone. Most automated counting systems, existing
on the literature, perform adequately when the colonies are well spaced, large, circular
in shape and with good contrast from the background. When these assumptions are
violated, most automated colony analysis systems can rapidly lose reliability, accuracy
and utility. To address the above problems, the goal of this study is to design and implement
a cost-effective, software-centred system that accepts general digital camera images
as its input, for detecting as well as enumerating bacterial colonies in a fully automatic
manner. An interactive semi-automatic system is also proposed to overcome any
error from fully automatic system. The two systems (automated and interactive) combine
thresholding, median filter and morphological operations to segment the colonies
on a Petri dish image. The next step consists in separating the individual colonies from
the clustered colonies. Then, the units colonies are counted. To separate and count
the clustered colonies, the automatic system uses a watershed transformation and the
interactive system uses the clicks of the user. The proposed systems are capable to
reduce the manpower and time required for counting colonies while producing correct
colony counting.
Description
Keywords
Colony counter Colony forming unit Colony segmentation Interactive methods
Citation
Ribeiro, J.E.; Martins, Ramiro; Monteiro, Fernando C. (2015). Interactive/automated method to count bacterial colonies. In III Encontro de Jovens Investigadores do IPB. Bragança, Portugal
Publisher
Instituto Politécnico de Bragança