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Abstract: To realize automatic counting of urediospores of Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici (Pst) (causal agent of wheat stripe rust), an automatic counting system for urediospores of wheat stripe rust pathogen based on image processing was developed using MATLAB GUIDE platform in combination with Local C Compiler (LCC). The system is independent of the MATLAB environment and can be run on a computer without the MATLAB software. Using this system, automatic counting of Pst urediospores in a microscopic image can be implemented via image processing technologies including image scaling, clustering segmentation, morphological modification, watershed transformation, connected region labeling, etc. Structure design of the automatic counting system, the key algorithms used in the system and realization of the main functions of the system were described in detail. Spore counting tests were conducted using microscopic digital images of Pst urediospores and the high accuracies more than 95% were obtained. The results indicated that it is feasible to count Pst urediospores automatically using the developed system based on image processing.
Keywords: puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici, wheat stripe rust, image processing, automatic counting, computer aided system, MATLAB
DOI: 10.25165/j.ijabe.20171005.3084
1 Introduction
Wheat stripe rust caused by Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici (Pst) is a kind of destructive epidemic disease that affects wheat production in China[1'2l China is the largest epidemic region of wheat stripe rust in the world[2]. As a typical air-borne disease, the pathogen that causes this disease mainly relies on the dispersal of Pst urediospores by airflow to complete the disease cycles. The amount and activity of pathogen propagules are the important driving factors of the occurrence and epidemics of wheat stripe rust[1'3l Therefore, it is very necessary to monitor the quantity and dynamics of Pst urediospores in the field. Now the slide method, petri dish method and spore trap method are usually used to capture the pathogen spores in the field[4'5l Usually, the trapped spores are counted by using the traditional microscopic counting method. Due to the great number and the small size of the trapped spores, this traditional method is time-consuming and labor consumptive. The long-time microscopic observation is easy to cause eye fatigue, and it is difficult to ensure the counting accuracy, usually resulting in great counting errors. Although molecular biology techniques...