Analysis of Flagellar Movements of Bacterial Cells using Digital Image Processing Techniques

The main objective of the present study is to develop an automatic tool to characterize the morphology of flagellar movements of bacterial cells in digital microscopic cell images. Geometric shape features are used to identify the different characteristics of bacterial cell flagellar movements, namely, monotrichous, lophotrichous, peritrichous and amphitrichous. The current methods rely on the subjective reading of profiles by a human expert based on the various manual staining methods. In this paper, an automated method is proposed for bacterial cell characterization based on their different characteristics of flagellar movements by segmenting digital bacterial cell images and extracting geometric shape features for cell morphology. The classification techniques, namely, 3? and K-NN classifiers are used to identify the bacterial cells based on their morphological characteristics. The experimental results are compared with the manual results obtained by the microbiology expert and demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.