Grain Size Measurement of Crystalline Products Using Maximum Difference Method

Texture analysis methods are widely used in various monitoring and measurement tasks in machine vision solutions. In this paper we present a novel method for the determination of grain size distributions in the manufacturing processes of crystalline products. Our method, maximum difference histogram (MDH), is based on statistical gray level differences in the texture images. Using this method, it is possible to estimate the grain size distributions in the images. It is also possible to monitor the average grain sizes in the image series acquired during the crystallization process. This is carried out by determining the center of gravity (CoG) of the distribution represented by MDH. Experimental results obtained from images acquired from a carbohydrate crystallization process reveal that the proposed method is useful in in-line grain size measurement tasks.