A splitting algorithm for touched particle based on distance map and particle shape information

This paper presents how to split touching particles. The algorithm mainly consists of two sub-algorithms; they are splitting based on concavities of boundaries and splitting based on object skeleton histogram. It first traces particle boundaries based on discontinuities, then splits touching parts of particles based on shape information, where no gray information can be used, by using morphological mathematics method (e.g. distance map) combining particle shape information (information is classified by using fuzzy mathematics). After that, the algorithm split the remaining touching parts by using the information of concavities of particle boundaries The algorithm can automatically delineate particles not only on a simple image (a few particles touching) and also on a complex image (many particles touching together). The algorithm has been tested in a laboratory; it works well for various particle images.

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