Image-based automatic counting of spotted fever-carrying tick larvae in vitro

• Weslley Kelson Ribeiro Figueredo Universidade Federal do Maranhão
• Isabella Chaves Sousa Universidade Federal do Maranhão
• João Otávio Bandeira Diniz Universidade Federal do Maranhão
• Aristófanes Corrêa Silva Universidade Federal do Maranhão
• Anselmo Cardoso de Paiva Universidade Federal do Maranhão
• Livio Martins Costa-Junior Universidade Federal do Maranhão

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/wvc.2019.7638

Resumo

Spotted fever or tick fever, a disease transmitted by ticks, has a high case-fatality rate when a treatment is not started early. To reduce the cases of tick fever, many acaricides are used for keeping control of tick population. However, these tests are done manually. To choose the most effective acaricide, a specialist has to count how many ticks are dead and how many are still alive after subjecting them to it. This test is time-consuming, so this work aims to automate this procedure. Therefore, it is proposed a computational methodology to automate this procedure through image processing. Through the proposed method, 99,14% of ticks larvae were found, and 99.34% of alive and 96.89% of dead ticks larvae were counted correctly in this work.

Palavras-chave: Ticks, Automatic counting, Acaricides, Image processing, FRST

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