Estimation of transmittance spectra from multiband micrographs of fungi and its application to segmentation of conidia and hyphae

Transmittance spectra of fungi were estimated from seven-band optical micrographs. An optical microscope adjusted with a single-chip CCD camera with seven band filters was used for image acquisition. The Wiener method was applied to estimate the transmittance spectra of five species that belong to one genus of fungi. The Wiener estimation operator was calculated from transmittance spectra of 16 color transparencies and the corresponding camera responses. The estimated transmittance spectra were used for segmentation of conidia and hyphae in fungal optical micrographs; then the competitive learning in an artificial neural network was applied to the segmentation.