A method for recognizing particles in overlapped particle images

Abstract

This paper describes a new method to divide a planar curve into circular arcs in order to recognize the overlapped particles in an image. The segmentation is based on a new breakpoint detection method. An area correlation coefficient for two arcs is introduced to identify and cluster the arcs belonging to the same circle. The Least-Squares Method is applied to estimate the center of a circle and its radius. The present method is evaluated using a computer-generated sample image and real coal-ash images with heavily overlapped particles taken by an electron microscope. All the results showed that the present method is effective in recognizing the overlapped circles with high accuracy. © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V.