Gel electrophoresis image segmentation with Otsu method based on Particle Swarm Optimization

Abstract

Gel electrophoresis (GE) is an important tool in genomic analysis. It is a process of DNA, RNA and protein molecules separation using electric field applied to a gel matrix. This paper describes the image processing techniques applied on GE image to segment the bands from their background. Numerous pre-processing steps are applied on the image prior to the segmentation technique for the purpose of removing noise in the image. Then multilevel thresholding using Otsu method based on Particle Swarm Optimization is applied. The experimental results show that the PSO-Otsu successfully segmented all the bands.