A Sample Application for Computer-Based Bacteria Counting by Using Watershed Transform

Abstract

Bacteria counting process and bacterial counting by eye can be performed by manual counting in which a specialist counts the bacteria with naked eye or the automatic counting that utilizes computer-based techniques. The counting process becomes exhausting, long, and incorrect when the counting is performed by specialist. Therefore, there is a need for an efficient and more reliable method for the bacteria counting process performed automatically. In this chapter, a semi-automatic method has been designed for bacterial counting from the images of petri plates and photomicrograph. For this purpose, the image processing procedure has been applied to the images. In the image processing procedure, watershed transform was used to separate the adjacent bacteria and thus a more accurate counting was performed. The efficiency of the presented method has been shown for many different images, and the counting results of the proposed method have been compared with counting results of an expert. The method has been shown to be a successful and promising work for bacterial counting.