On the Optimization of Microbial Detection in Water Treatment using Image Statistics

Abstract

Water treatment process nowadays become an important and in fact unavoidable process before it has been consumed. Though there exists plethora of methods in water treatment process, it makes a sense to use an optimized treatment process, which holds good for all quality parameters to be met. The treatment process and optimization technique depends on the type of water usage. In this proposal, measurement optimization has been carried out in municipal water treatment in disinfection stage. Bacterial culture development based method could give the bacterial count but takes time of about 24 hours to obtain the result. Since the water supply quantity is high and frequent water delivery is common, it is essential to fasten the bacterial count measurement, based on which, degree of disinfection may be decided. This disinfection problem is very critical because many diseases spread through water containing several harmful virus and bacteria. This research proposal has got vital importance because, the contamination in water is rising day by day due to increase in the pollutants added to the ground water. The era of technology with available advancements in video processing and other electronic means may still improve the scenario, as proposed in our work to ensure the accurate measurement of bacterial presence through the statistical parameters such as kurtosis, skewness and standard deviation. This novel method of acquiring image features of water samples would result in further enhancement in post treatment of water result in high quality of water. Moreover, water treatment plant erection has become a major potential of revenue in this era, where a better optimization in measurement process is always needed. The performance analysis of our proposed measurement method has also been presented with a real time video acquired on water samples.