Simple Tool for Semi-automated Evaluation of Yeast Colony Images

Abstract

A tool for semi-automated evaluation of images of yeast colonies is presented in the paper. The input data for the tool is a batch of Petri dish images, possibly in nested directories, the output is written to a text file in a simple CSV (comma-separated values) format. The tool is designed to evaluate, for each dish image, the relative coverage of the dish and the number of colonies contained in the dish. It is intended for use in a research laboratory, where a general-purpose imaging setup is used to take the images, which are then processed off-line.In the paper, the characteristic features of the yeast colony images are described and the processing flow and the user interface of the tool are reviewed. The performance of the counting is evaluated using a test set of 245 images with typical relative coverage of less than 10%.The tool is available for download from our web page.