Lactobacillus Bacterial Cell Segmentation Based on Marker Controlled Watershed Method

A technique for the segmentation of Scanning Electron Microscopic (SEM) image of bacteria cells is proposed. There have been lots of efforts to replace the human eye inspection of biological data by automatic inspection. SEM image inspection is one of the major initiatives in this direction. Conventional biologist identify bacteria using colony morphology or by using bio-chemical approaches. However these approaches are tedious, time consuming and depends on the expertise of biologist. It is a complex task to segment SEM image of bacteria cells due to diversity of patterns, high level of noise content and variation in the image offset. In order to preserve the details at fine scales, marker controlled watershed is used, where markers are generated automatically this helps in limiting over segmentation. Experiment shows that method can accurately and quickly segment the bacteria cells.