The Research And Development On Automatic Colony Counter

C olony counting is an important and daily task in the food, medicine, cosmetics, air quality monitoring and quarantine, etc. Current ly, the majority of the quara ntine and laboratori es are still using the method of pouri ng agar into plat e to culture colony. I apply the technique of i mage processing i n developing a automatic colony counter. It not only improves the rec ognition accur acy and efficiency, but also saves the original data and reduces t he burden of human labor. In thi s paper, I apply i mage process ing and combined program ming of M ATLAB & VC++ in developing software of aut omat ic colony counter.The main researc h is surmised as foll ows:(1) I choose the LED light source and backlight t o e stablish the colony im age acquisition sys tem by analysing different kinds of light source and light ing system. Then I realize the real-t ime acquisition of colony i mages on this basi s. I cal ibrat i ndustrial camera of im age acquis ition system, and get the li near function for cali brating the industrial camera.(2) I use technology of gray proces sing with MATLAB to reduce the image information owners hip. Applyi ng the grays cal e image smoothi ng to reduce the interfere nce of noise. By compari ng resul ts of severa l classical algorithms in thres hold segment ati on, I propose a new threshold segmentation algor ithm – Statistical Curve Difference Method.Experiment shows that this al gorithm adapt s to this topic researc h colony images well.Finally, I get the binary image only contains colonies by hough transform which eli minates the plate edge information.(3) I use s ome morphology processi ng algorithm to adhesive colony for separa tion, to concave and repair the hole; At the beginning of col ony counting, I select ing the s eed click method, which is contras ted with the results of traditional watershed al gorithm; By the morphologica l analys is, I put forward t he im provement of shape factor algorithm.(4) I write executable file of user interfac es and the database using VC++, whi ch can run aparti ng from the VC++ and MATLAB platform. It is easy to opera te t he user interface,which incl udes function of counting colony automatical ly, displayi ng data, output data,saving and querying history data,analysi ng anti biotic titer.etc.The results of ex periment show that this system can implement counting colony automatically. Counting accurac y of the sys tem i s 96.57%. This sys tem is suitable for the colony counting and morphologic al analysis to round coloni es. It sti ll need furt her researc hwhether colony counter is s uitable for colonies of other s hape.