MicroCount: Free Software For Automated Microorganism Colony Counting By Computer

Counting of Bacterial Colony Forming is one of the primary techniques used in microbiology to quantify and isolate different groups of microorganisms. Despite being a time-consuming and laborious task, it is still predominantly performed manually. Most of automated solutions currently are developed for specific scenarios or has a high acquisition cost. It was developed new software for automated and manual colony count, through a rich set of image filter and computer vision techniques. Better result in microorganism identification were achieved a by improving the initial stages of the images processing, through filters that highlights image areas and sensibility control for segmentation routines. This improvement makes the software has no requisites on image acquiring way, differently of most current solutions. The integration of filters, segmentation and count techniques freely controlled by final user achieved better results than existing solutions.