Image mosaic method for recognition of proton track in nuclear emulsions

Abstract The recognition of the tracks in a nuclear emulsion is usually completed by a microscope system. However, the area of the field of view (FOV) of the microscope system is very small for the recognition of the entire proton-recoil tracks in nuclear emulsions. We have to stitch the images observed in several FOVs to obtain a large region including all entire tracks. Unfortunately, the hysteresis errors and the vibrations of the microscope stage will cause uncertainties in the relative locations between the adjacent FOVs, which will seriously affect the track recognition. In this paper, we propose an image mosaic method based on an improved ratio template matching algorithm, so as to accurately obtain the relative locations between the adjacent FOVs. The method can effectively suppress the position errors caused by the hysteresis error and the vibration from more than 10 μm to about 0.5 μm.