Patent ID: 8508588

Claim:
A method of locating the wall boundaries of test wells arranged on the surface of a microplate comprising: illuminating a microplate and capturing a digital image of said microplate; analyzing the digital image of the microplate utilizing, at least in part, pixel intensity information to detect features of the wall boundaries of the test wells; generating a candidate edge image of the microplate using the features of the wall boundaries wherein the candidate edge image represents locations of one or more segments of the wall boundaries; analyzing the candidate edge image using an algorithm to calculate the outer perimeter boundary of one or more test wells and to determine the spatial location of the outer perimeter boundary on the surface of the microplate; analyzing the outer perimeter boundary of the one or more test wells utilizing, at least in part, pixel intensity information to determine the spatial location of the inner perimeter boundary of one or more test wells; mapping the spatial domain image of the boundary on the microplate to identify test well regions on the surface of the microplate.