Real-Time Bacterial Colony Count Detection and Classification Using Computer Vision †

Paper in proceeding, 2026

Counting bacterial colonies by hand is one of the most common tasks in microbiology, but it is slow and often yields different results depending on who does the counting. This paper presents an automated system for detecting and classifying bacterial colonies from Petri plate images. We tested four models: Support Vector Machine (SVM), Artificial Neural Network (ANN), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and a hybrid CNN+Vision Transformer (CNN+ViT). The system uses OpenCV for image preprocessing and extracts features such as area, perimeter, and circularity. Colonies are then classified by size and health condition. Confusion matrix results show that SVM and ANN achieved the highest overall accuracy (95.6%), while CNN+ViT eliminated false positives entirely. A Streamlit-based web interface allows real-time colony analysis directly in laboratory environments.