Automatic classification of bacterial cells in digital microscopic images

Abstract

The objective of the present study is to develop an automatic tool to identify and classify the bacterial cells in digital microscopic cell images. Geometric features are used to identify the different types of bacterial cells, namely, bacilli, cocci and spiral. The current methods rely on the subjective reading of profiles by a human expert based on the various manual staining methods. In this paper, we propose a method for bacterial classification by segmenting digital bacterial cell images and extracting geometric features for cell classification. The experimental results are compared with the manual results obtained by the microbiology expert and demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method. © 2010 Copyright SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering.