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From: tbissett@nstar.rn.com (Travis Bissett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.applications,comp.sys.amiga.graphics
Subject: Re: counting items in digitized images
Message-ID: <0k7k22w161w@nstar.rn.com>
Date: 7 May 91 19:03:56 GMT
References: <1991May7.002855.4111@ducvax.auburn.edu>
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bwaid@ducvax.auburn.edu writes:

> Does anyone know of a program that will count the number of occurences of 
> something in a digitized image. Some people at a medical school are trying to
> count the number of cells in an image on an Amiga. Any help will be
> appreciated. 

Speaking from my own personal ignorance, I'd be surprised if you find a 
ready made canned solution to the problem you described. It really is 
non-trivial -- but then, it's the sort of challenge that many in academia 
and industry have been working on for a long time. In essence you've asked 
for a free and easy solution to the "robot vision" problem.  You want to 
take a digitized image, perform certain signal processing techniques, and 
end up with an unamgbiguous set of visual "objects" (whether they are tansk 
or cells or bolts in a bag). It certainly is in the realm of technical 
possibility to count cells from a microscopic camera picture -- I've yet to 
hear of a commercial explotation of it, though, which suggests that the 
problem is still in the experimental/developmental stages. The counting part 
is easy --once you get a clean image of idebtifying cell structure just 
adapt normal OCR algorithms. But getting a setup and program versatile 
enough to remove all variables of slide specimen, camera noise, etc. is a 
real task. Maybe a semi-automatic process is good enough for now, where some 
grad student makes the decision about what signal processing needs to be 
performed in order to get the acceptable level of image quality.

Sorry that I'm no help :-)

Travis

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