Automatic Lane Detection in Chromatography Images

This paper proposes a method for automating the detection of lanes in Thin-Layer Chromatography images. Our approach includes a preprocessing step to detect the image region of interest, followed by background estimation and removal. This image is then projected onto the horizontal direction to integrate the information into a one-dimensional profile. A smoothing filter is applied to this profile and the outcome is the input of the lane detection process, which is performed in three phases. The first one aims at obtaining an initial set of candidate lanes that are further validated or removed in the second phase. The last phase is a refinement step that allows the inclusion of lanes that are not clearly distinguishable in the profile and that were not included in the initial set. The method was evaluated in 66 chromatography images and achieved values of recall, precision and Fβ-measure of 97.0%, 99.4% and 98.2%, respectively.