Gel Electrophoresis Image Segmentation with Kapur Method Based on Particle Swarm Optimization

One of the important tool in genomic analysis is Gel Eletrophoresis. It is a tool that is routinely used in genetics, microbiology, forensics, molecular biology and biochemistry. GE is also used in separating DNA, RNA and protein molecules by using electric field applied to a gel matrix. This paper describes the application of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) that is a population-based optimization technique based on the sociological interaction associated with bird flocking using the Kapur thresholding method to segment the DNA bands from the background. PSO is employed to achieve the optimum threshold levels selection. In addition, PSO greatly reduces the computational time. Median filter is used prior image segmentation to remove noise and ambiguous pixels. The experimental results show that the application the optimization technique on Kapur method successfully produces good separation of DNA bands from the background.