Method for Counting Microorganisms and Colonies in Microscopic Images

This paper presents a method to count microorganisms and colonies in microscopic images. The method uses a series of morphological operations to create a representation in which the objects of interest are easily isolated and counted. The proposal is successful in most cases, properly dealing with some difficult situations like when the sizes of the objects vary strongly and when there is low contrast between the objects and the background. Studies are underway in order to improve the performance of the method when dealing with strongly merged objects.