Computer-Aided Somatic Cells Counting on Three Different Milk Staining Condition

Abstract

The maximum amount of somatic cell in a millilitre of milk defined by National Standardization Agency is 4x105 cells/ml. The condition of milk will be excluded from a decent quality if the amount of somatic cell is greater than it. Microscopic image of somatic cells counting is a conventional method which utilized by farmer or researcher to count the number of somatic cells from dairy milk sample. The problems of this method are: 1) The counting process is manually conducted which prone to miscalculation, 2) The different colour of staining (purplish, bluish, and greenish) may complicate the calculation. In this research, a computer-based approach is proposed to calculate the number of somatic cells from sample of milk and to eliminate the difficulty of different colour due to staining technique. Image processing knowledge i.e. erosion, dilation, colour conversion, and BLOB Analysis are involved and utilized to achieve the objective. Overall, the correctness of the system in detecting the number of somatic cells is 94%. From this study, a comprehensive system to calculate the number of somatic cells from cow’s milk will be closer to be implemented.