TY  - JOUR
ID  - 20603075
AU  - Grishin, Igor
AU  - Thomson, Keven
AU  - Migliorini, Francesca
AU  - Sloan, James J.
T1  - Application of the Hough transform for the automatic determination of soot aggregate morphology
JO  - Applied Optics
SP  - 610
EP  - 620
VL  - 51
IS  - 5
PY  - 2012
N2  - We report a new method for automated identification and measurement of primary particles within soot aggregates as well as the sizes of the aggregates and discuss its application to high-resolution transmission electron microscope (TEM) images of the aggregates. The image processing algorithm is based on an optimized Hough transform, applied to the external border of the aggregate. This achieves a significant data reduction by decomposing the particle border into fragments, which are assumed to be spheres in the present application, consistent with the known morphology of soot aggregates. Unlike traditional techniques, which are ultimately reliant on manual (human) measurement of a small sample of primary particles from a subset of aggregates, this method gives a direct measurement of the sizes of the aggregates and the size distributions of the primary particles of which they are composed. The current version of the algorithm allows processing of high-resolution TEM images by a conventional laptop computer at a rate of 1–2 ms per aggregate. The results were validated by comparison with manual image processing, and excellent agreement was found.
M1  - 53021
DO  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1364/AO.51.000610
U3  - NRC Institute for Chemical Process and Environmental Technology
U3  - Institut de technologie des procédés chimiques et de l'environnement du CNRC
U3  - National Research Council Canada
U3  - Conseil national de recherches Canada
ER  -