Python Programming for Biology: Bioinformatics and Beyond

Feature detection

Lastly  in  this  chapter  we  show  a  practical  example  that  aims  to  automatically  extract

information  about  the  physical  objects  that  are  represented  by  an  image.  This  touches

lightly on the field of image recognition,  although  what  we  show  is  simple  compared  to

state-of-the art techniques. Nonetheless it aims to give a basic idea of what kind of thing is

possible. The objective will be to count the number of cells in a digital photograph taken

using a microscope, which is a fairly routine data-gathering task in biology.