Protecting Human Health from Airborne Biological Hazardous Material by an Automatic Image Acquisition and Interpretation System

Abstract: Human beings are exposed every day to bio-aerosols in their personal and/or professional life. The European Commission has issued regulations for protecting employees in the workplace from biological hazards. Airborne fungi can be detected and identified by an image-acquisition and interpretation system. In this paper we present recent results on the development of an automated image acquisition, sample handling and image-interpretation system for airborne fungi identification. We explain the application domain and describe the development issues. The development strategy and the architecture of the system are described and results are presented.