Colony counter is a laboratory equipment used for automated counting of microbial colonies on culture media. Its core principle is based on optical imaging and image processing technology, combined with pressure sensing or touch operation to achieve counting. It is widely used in fields such as food and environmental monitoring.
It mainly consists of components such as counters, probes, and counting pools. Counter usually adopts CMOS integrated circuit design, matched with LED digital display, with a word height of generally 13mm, clear and bright. The probe pen is used to touch bacterial colonies for counting, while the counting pool is a place for placing culture dishes, some of which have lighting functions.
Optical Imaging and Image Processing
Collect images of the culture dish under specific light sources (such as white light, ultraviolet light) through high-resolution cameras or optical sensors. Using edge detection, threshold segmentation and other algorithms to identify colony contours, distinguish colonies from the background (such as dark colonies vs. transparent culture medium), filter out small bubbles, scratches and other interferences, and count colony targets that meet the preset size and shape.
Place the culture dish to be tested with the bottom facing up into the counting cell, and use a probe to count all the colonies on the bottom of the dish one by one. The pressure sensing system of the probe will transmit a signal to the counter, and the colony area will be marked with a color. The numbers in the display window will automatically accumulate, thus achieving the counting of the number of colonies.
Product Features
Accurate counting: The induction pressure counting system is used to avoid duplicate counting, and some instruments also have a "Back" button. When the counting is incorrect, the value can be pushed back to ensure the accuracy of the counting.
Clear lighting: Usually equipped with energy-saving circular fluorescent lamps or LED lights as the light source, using a black depth background counting cell, side illumination, uniform brightness without dazzling, and clear comparison of bacterial colonies.
Versatile features: Some colony counters have built-in intelligent colony recognition algorithms, supporting automatic segmentation of adherent colonies, multi-color statistics, and grid filter analysis. They are also equipped with audit tracking, data encryption storage, and Excel/PDF export functions.