  Gel electrophoresis, a widely used technique to separate DNA according to
their size and weight, generates images that can be analyzed automatically.
Manual or semiautomatic image processing presents a bottleneck for further
development and leads to reproducibility issues. In this paper, we present a
fully automated system with high accuracy for analyzing DNA and proteins. The
proposed algorithm consists of four main steps: automatic thresholding,
shifting, filtering, and data processing. Automatic thresholding, used to
equalize the gray values of the gel electrophoresis image background, is one of
the novel operations in this algorithm. Enhancement is also used to improve
poor quality images that have faint DNA bands. Experimental results show that
the proposed technique eliminates defects due to noise for average quality gel
electrophoresis images, while it also improves the quality of poor images.
