Abstract

Historically, the rate of experimentation involving micro biological procedures is slow due to, for example, the incubation and analysis of samples. Recently, a number of optical and image processing techniques have been developed to analyse samples to improve accuracy by removing human error and speed up the data acquisition process. One such example where commercial products (Data Cell, Berks. U.K.) are available is in counting colony forming units (efu) grown on agar culture plates. Commercial products are prohibitively expensive and, in general, do not support other applications of the image processing equipment. The present work developed macros to count Escherichia coli using OPTIMAS, a commercially available software package for general image processing applications. The effect of the environment - lighting conditions, camera, focusing, threshold intensity, and filtering - on the efficiency of the counting system was investigated.

© 1996 IEEE