Protótipo de dispositivo contador de colônias de bactérias em placas de Petri

Abstract

In this work, a prototype of a device capable of counting bacterial colonies in Petri dishes was developed. This procedure is very important in the various areas involving microbiology and is generally done manually, so equipment that assists this process can be of great help. The equipment consists of a 3D-printed support, an ESP32-CAM® module, and a set of LEDs for the flash. Image processing was developed based on thresholding algorithms, connected object counting, and morphological operations. The images used are grayscale photos to save the microcontroller’s memory. These algorithms are already well-defined in high-level languages, but are little explored in microcontrolled systems due to the low amount of memory available. Positive results were obtained for clusters of large and distant objects in Petri dishes, however for situations in which the objects were small and close together the system did not perform well.