Morphological segmentation of yeast by image analysis

An image analysis method has been developed to segment yeast cells. Yeasts belong to the taxonomic group fungi and have been used on fuel and food industry, for example. The method is capable of segmenting yeast cells based on Watershed Transform and space-scale analysis of the Tree of Critical Lakes. We analise hierarchical, geometric and gray-scale properties of the Tree of Critical Lakes. We show experimental results for one group of yeast images obtained from the School ofFood Engineering at Unicamp, Brazil. Comparison shows that the proposed method provides cells with area 10% lower than traditional approach. Moreover, this approach preserves the cells contour, an important feature because of the performance of bioreactors and other chemical processes are greatly influenced by their morphological character.