Response analysis of odor sensor based upon insect olfactory receptors using image processing method

Abstract

Although an artificial odor sensing system has been studied, we studied the odor sensing system using biological cells expressing insect ORs (Olfactory Receptors). An insect OR has excellent sensitivity and selectivity owing to the nature of biological living cell. We made the fluorescent measurement system capturing fluorescent image of biological cells. However, it is easily influenced by noise since the fluorescent light is very weak. In the present study, we focused on the image processing technique to extract the cell area with fluorescent change from the entire image. The experimental result suggests signal to noise ratio was improved by this technique.