Yeast concentration analysis by using the portable microscope based on the fiber-optic array

Abstract

Yeast cells are always used in the biofuel, alcoholic and baking industries. Real-time monitoring of the yeast concentration without any algorithm processing is significant to master the yeast cells surviving condition. Here we demonstrate a new method to monitor the yeast cell concentration using our previous developed microscope—portable microscopy based on fiber-optic array (FOA). The sample is illuminated by a broadband LED and a light diffuser is used to create uniform illumination over the entire field-of-view (FOV). The image pre-processing including the denoising and binarization are used for the images optimization to increase the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Automated counting of the yeast cells is performed on a computer using ImageJ. The paper provides a new method for the counting of the yeast cells.