Fast measuring particle size by using the information of particle boundary and shape

Abstract

To quickly and accurately estimate average size of densely packed particles on a fast moving conveyor belt, a new image processing method is designed and studied. The method consists of two major algorithms, one is a one-pass boundary detection algorithm that is specially designed for the images of densely packed particles (the word "particle" is used in a wide sense), and the other is average size estimation based on image edge density. The algorithms are cooperative. The method has been tested experimentally for different kinds of closely packed particle images which are difficult to detect by ordinary image segmentation algorithms. The new method avoids delineating and measuring every particle on an image, therefore, is suitable for real-time imaging. It is particularly applicable for a densely packed and complicated particle image sequence. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.