Automatic Particle Recognition Based on Digital lmage Processing

Abstract

The purpose of the research is to develop and compare various methods and algorithms for effective particle analysis based on their visual characteristics. Тhe purpose of this article is to develop and compare various methods and algorithms for effective particle analysis based on their visual characteristics. Тhe paper considers two fundamentally different approaches: the analysis of grayscale gradients and the machine learning method.Methods.Тhe research methodology includes the analysis of particle images obtained by precipitation from colloidal solutions after laser ablation and images of powder particles for selective laser melting. Тhe materials were obtained using a Quanta 200 3D electron microscope (FЕ/). For the analysis, threshold brightness binarization, contour recognition methods by the Kenny operator and the Hough algorithm are used to combine boundary points into connected contours. For comparison, the U-Net neural network solution was used, and a dataset generator was created to train the neural network. Hand-cut images of aluminum alloy powder particles and micro and nanoparticles of various metals are used as data for generation.Results.Тhe results of the study show that the Hough method provides recognition of the number of particles at the level of 80%, and the machine learning method achieves 95% accuracy in recognizing the shape of particles. Both methods can be used to analyze microand nanoparticles, including irregularly shaped particles.Conclusion.Тhe findings of the work confirm that neural networks are the optimal solution for automatic particle recognition in digital images. However, in order to create a dataset of sufficient volume, it is necessary to develop a generator of labeled images, which requires a detailed study of the subject area.