Counting Bacteria Colonies Based on Image Processing Methods

Counting of microbial colonies is crucial due to the applications of medical microbiology to search and detect the causes of diseases. While different tasks performed, the counting process of bacteria colonies is provided either by the searcher manually or by a common software, nowadays. The manual counting of bacteria colonies is tiresome, eye-straining, and time-consuming for the searcher where common softwares require high troublesome with having high error rates. The aim of this study is detecting and counting bacteria colonies without having these limitations in today's non-practical applications. Therefore, an image-processing based bacteria colony counter designed in MATLAB. In the medical plasma laboratory of the Izmir Katip Celebi University three different types of hospital-acquired infection cause bacterias, which are Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Enterococcus faecalis, cultured and examined properly, then, using the Circular Hough Transform (CHT) in MATLAB the detection and counting of bacteria colonies provided. To be able to obtain more practical usage, a Graphical User Interface (GUI) designed.