Automated Counting of Bacterial Colonies

A function to automate bacterial colony counting in images of plated agar in a Petri dish.

Provides colony_count.m to automate counting of bacterial colonies.

The approach is as follows:

1. Use Hough transform to locate Petri dish.
2. Threshold with Otsu's method.
3. Count colonies as regional maxima in the original image which are present in the segmentation.

David Young's circular Hough transform functions are required. They are available here:
http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/26978-hough-transform-for-circles

Currently, a range of Petri dish radii is required as a parameter.

This program was originally developed for a Stack Overflow question found here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9954891/counting-colonies-on-a-petri-dish.

Future plans are to increase versatility by automating parameter selection and reducing sensitivity to experimental and imaging conditions (lighting, bright/dark field, media color). Features suggested in comments will be considered for addition.