Analysis of volumetric images of filamentous bacteria in industrial sludge

This article describes the application of image analysis in evaluation of filamentous bacteria in industrial sludge bulking which may be useful in environmental pollution control. The volumetric images are obtained from confocal microscope. Many conventional and heuristic methods are conveniently used to reduce the noise and enhance the object features. Moreover, it has been shown that the segmentation based on the combination of different image analysis tools is very useful in extracting the filamentous bacterial structure, qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the industrial sludge images and to study the spatial distribution of the filamentous bacteria