What is Agar Media

Counting of bacterial colonies on agar plates is a routine practice to get a rough estimate of the number of viable cells in a sample. The number of colonies in a culture is predominantly manually counted to calculate the concentration of bacteria in the original broth; however, manual counting can be tedious, time-consuming and imprecise. Automation of colony counting has been of increasing interest for many decades, and these methods have been shown to be more consistent than manual counting. Significant limitations of many algorithms used in automated systems are their inability to recognize overlapping colonies as distinct and to count colonies on the plate boundary. This study proposes an interactive counting system and a fully automated system using image processing which overcomes these problems. The proposed system is capable to reduce the manpower and time required for counting while taking account colonies both around the central area and boundary areas of the dish. These systems are part of an application to count colonies based in a mobile phone camera.