Multilevel thresholding of gel electrophoresis images using firefly algorithm

Gel electrophoresis (GE) is a process of DNA, RNA and protein molecules separation using electric field applied to a gel matrix. This paper describes the image processing techniques applied on GE image to segment the bands from their background. A few pre-processing steps are applied on the image prior to the segmentation technique for the purpose of removing noise in the image. Multilevel thresholding using Otsu method based on Firefly Algorithm is developed. The experimental results show that the Otsu-FA produced good separation of DNA bands and its background.