Separation of touching objects/particles is a step before measuring morphological characteristics. An approach for identifying and splitting touching char particles is presented. The proposed approach is based on two processes. First, concave points are detected using a concavity measure and a list of touching point candidates is built. Second, separation lines are identified using location, length, blur and size. A decision criterion is derived for deciding whether or not to split a particle. The proposed approach is evaluated using 180 images of char particles and compared to the Watershed algorithm. The evaluation was twofold: quantifying the accuracy of identifying touching particles and measuring the separation quality. Expert criteria are used as a ground truth for qualitative evaluations. A good agreement between the visual judgement and automatic results was obtained, using the proposed approach.

Date Published: 4 March 2015
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 9443, Sixth International Conference on Graphic and Image Processing (ICGIP 2014), 94431W (4 March 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2180001

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9443:
Sixth International Conference on Graphic and Image Processing (ICGIP 2014)
Yulin Wang; Xudong Jiang; David Zhang, Editor(s)