Poor DNA gel electrophoresis image enhancement: Spatial vs. frequency domain filters

Abstract

This paper presents the enhancement of poor electrophoresis gel image for lane and band detection. In plants, the DNA gel electrophoresis was performed for analytical purposes to identify the banding patterns of DNA base pair, which can reveal the genetic relatedness, identify the plants genomic and many more. Due to the quality and pattern of the images, the lane and band detection in the DNA gel images present a great challenge to computer interpretation. The image enhancement is performed using two different filters that are spatial and frequency filter. The two approaches are compared, which the expectation from the enhanced image is the detection of lanes can be conducted properly and accurately before performing further analysis to detect the bands. Forty-six of poor quality plant DNA gel images in .jpeg format with different size were used in this study. The quality of the enhanced images was accessed and evaluated using objective image quality metric, the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). The results that were obtained show that spatial domain filtering is a promising approach in the enhancement process of the poor DNA gel images.