abstract
- For a food to be considered functional it is necessary to prove that it has microorganisms in its composition. In order to determine the presence of microorganisms in a food, laboratory analyzes can be carried out using of Petri dishes, which must pass through an incubation period, to then manually count the number of bacterial colonies that are present in each board. Therefore, the objective of this work was to develop a software to perform the automated counting of colonies contained in Petri plates and to validate the efficiency of the tool through comparisons with the results of a manual count. For this, an algorithm was developed based on digital image processing techniques capable of identifying the Petri dish within the image and counting the number of colonies present on each plate. As a result, a global correlation of 0.948 was observed in relation to the manual count, and in an individual analysis, a correlation of 0.8134 was obtained. Thus, it can be concluded that counts of microorganisms can be performed automatically and reliably with the developed software.