An Image Processing Platform for Expendable Bio-sensing System with Arrayed Biosensor and Embedded Imager

An image processing platform has been proposed aiming to develop expendable bio-sensing system with arrayed biosensor and embedded imager. For rapid and iterative prototyping in a variety of imagers, the platform is designed to be independent of the actual imager by giving us a unified interface to control the actual imager such as exposure, gain and acquisition timing. It also gives us various functions to analyze fluorescent emission at each sensor element from a whole image of arrayed biosensor. By using this platform, we have developed two types of bio-sensing system: (1) a reference system with a cooled CCD camera and fluorescent microscope, and (2) an expendable system prototype with an embedded CMOS image sensor and simple hand-made optics. It was confirmed that the performance insufficiency of the expendable system prototype is easily characterized by comparison of image statistics between the two systems. Since such comparability is drastically ensured and facilitated by using the proposed platform, it is useful for rapid and iterative prototyping of such expendable system.