Harnessing deep learning for faster water quality assessment: identifying bacterial contaminants in real time

Abstract Water is essential for human survival. Humans can live without food for a few days but without water, a person can barely survive for 3–5 days. Various parts of the world, particularly under-developed countries, have regions where clean water is scarce, and humans living in such conditions have no access to clean water. Our solution provides information on whether water is contaminated or not. Moreover, it overcomes the delay time in getting the result of water contamination using traditional methods of up to 5–6 hrs. Our proposed method detects the colonies of the bacteria that are taken from the water sample (after gram staining) and then classifies the type of bacteria to whom it belongs and how much quantity of each bacterium causes infection to the human body. Bacteria detection is performed by a novel deep learning-based model with user-specified parameters. To improve our ability to detect dangerous bacteria including E. coli, yeast, and particles, we perform tests using datasets from a variety of researchers. On the test benchmark, the fine-tuned proposed model achieves 84.56% accuracy and provides the level of contamination in water.