Measurement of the biomass concentration from a bioprocess by image processing techniques

Abstract

This paper deals with the measurement of the biomass concentration in a bioprocess, with a final purpose of building an on-line concentration transducer, for the control of a continuous bioprocess. The proposed method is based on processing the images of the target population, captured by a camera under a regular bright field microscope. The image processing algorithm for this method was developed and experimentally validated, in the case of the species Sacharomices cerevisiae. Its main properties are: no human operation required, fast computing (less than 10 sec.), low error level.