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A Method For Recognizing Particles in Overlapped Particle PDF
A Method For Recognizing Particles in Overlapped Particle PDF
www.elsevier.nl/locate/patrec
Abstract
This paper describes a new method to divide a planar curve into circular arcs in order to recognize the overlapped
particles in an image. The segmentation is based on a new breakpoint detection method. An area correlation coecient
for two arcs is introduced to identify and cluster the arcs belonging to the same circle. The Least-Squares Method is
applied to estimate the center of a circle and its radius. The present method is evaluated using a computer-generated
sample image and real coal-ash images with heavily overlapped particles taken by an electron microscope. All the
results showed that the present method is eective in recognizing the overlapped circles with high accuracy. Ó 2000
Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Circular arc detection; Segmentation of planar curve; Recognition of overlapped circles; Breakpoint detection.
0167-8655/00/$ - see front matter Ó 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 1 6 7 - 8 6 5 5 ( 9 9 ) 0 0 1 3 0 - 0
22 L. Shen et al. / Pattern Recognition Letters 21 (2000) 21±30
the detection of breakpoint. Most breakpoint de- mentioned is the iterative method, such as those
tection methods are based on the identi®cation of reported by Rosin and West (1995), Sakaue (1982)
curvature extrema (Pla, 1996; Lim et al., 1995). and Sakaue and Takagi (1983). Although the it-
But all these methods have the disadvantages of erative method has many advantages, such as non-
sensitivity to noise and their dependence on pa- parametric, invariant to transformations, simple
rameters that are chosen empirically. In image and generic, the curve will inevitably be divided
processing the contours of round objects are not into too many segments and which will increase
smooth curves but a digital form of them. There- the diculty of clustering and thus increase the
fore the curvature of a curve cannot be calculated computational time.
accurately. In order to calculate the approximate This paper presents a new method to recognize
curvature, the curve ®rst has to be smoothed. overlapped round particles in images. The method
Unfortunately, although the smoothing process includes the following three steps:
makes it possible to calculate curvature of a curve, 1. detecting the edge of overlapped particles,
it cannot assure the accuracy of the result, espe- 2. dividing the edge into circular arcs,
cially near the breakpoints. Furthermore, some 3. grouping the circular arcs belonging to the
important information will be lost during same circle.
smoothing process. For example, the smoothing The present paper focuses on the second and
process will make the corners on the curve blunt the third steps of the method. A new method,
and more dicult to detect. In our previous work which is based on the detection of breakpoint, is
(Yamamoto et al., 1997), we adopted the method introduced to divide a digital curve into circular
reported by Pla (1996), but the results were not arcs at ®rst. The identi®cation of breakpoints de-
satisfactory. One of our earlier results is shown in pends on the probabilities of pixels on a curve as
Fig. 1. In some method of this class, the curvature extremum points during a rotational transforma-
is not calculated based on the contour directly but tion which will be explained in detailed in Section
the chain-coded contour. In the method reported 2.1. The pixels with high probability are consid-
by Teh and Chin (1989), not only the curvatures of ered as breakpoints. The area correlation method
points but also the region of support of them are is introduced to cluster the circular arcs belonging
taken into accounted. In the paper reported by to the same circle. Canny's method (Canny, 1986)
Sanchize et al. (1998), the classical operations were was adopted to detect the edge of overlapped
substituted by a neural network and the dominant particles in the paper.
points were detected by the outputs of the net- The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2,
work. Another kind of method worthy of being we introduce our method of circle recognition
from an overlapped particle image. The section
includes three parts, i.e. curve segmentation, arc
clustering and parameter estimation. An examina-
tion of this method on a computer-generated im-
age and its application on coal-ash image are given
in Section 3.
2. Method of separation
Each such curve may include several arcs which points are joint pixels among these extremum
belong to dierent circles if it is the contour of points, i.e., point D and point G. Therefore, the
some overlapped circles. An example is shown in breakpoints cannot be identi®ed by only ®nding
Fig. 2, such a curve should be divided into several the local extremum points. Fortunately, these local
circular arcs. extremum points will have dierent properties
A key to segmenting a planar digital curve into when the curve is rotated by a small angle.
circular arcs is to determine the breakpoints, As shown in Fig. 4, the curve is rotated by a
namely joint pixels of dierent arcs on the curve. small angle centered on the point A (the dotted
An example of such curves is shown in Fig. 3. Here curve is its original position). After rotating, we
we can ®nd that the joint pixels are all located on can ®nd that some of the local extremum points on
sharp corners of the curve, i.e., on local extremum the original curve are no longer local extremum
points. Suppose we describe the curve with a series points on the rotated curve, such as points B, C, E
of pixels, and the coordinates of these pixels are and F. However, the joint pixels, point D and G,
designated by (x1 , y1 ), (x2 , y2 ), . . . , (xN , yN ). A joint still satisfy Eq. (1). In other words, they keep the
pixel (xi , yi ) satis®es the following conditions: status of local extremum points after the rotation
process. If we rotate the curve continuously and
xiÿ1 6 xi P xi1 _
xiÿ1 P xi 6 xi1
record the local extremum points at every step, the
_
yiÿ1 6 yi P yi1 _
yiÿ1 P yi 6 yi1 :
1 joint point will have a high probability of being an
extremum point during the whole rotation process.
Here, 2 6 i 6 N ÿ 1, and N is the number of pixels This dierent properties between joint pixels and
on the curve. other pixels during rotation is the key point in our
A pixel (xi , yi ) is called a local extremum point if new method.
it satis®es the above conditions. It is obvious that In the present method the curve is rotated by a
all joint pixels are local extremum points. But not small angle step continuously from 0° to 360°.
all local extremum points are joint pixels. For ex- During the rotation process, a true joint pixel on
ample, on the curve in Fig. 3, there are six local the curve will appear as a local extremum point
extremum points, i.e. point B±G, but only two with a very high probability. According to our
numerical experiments for a joint pixel, its prob-
ability of being a local extremum point is about
four to ®ve times of the average probability. The
situation will be shown later (in Figs. 9 and 10).
The whole detection process of joint points is
represented by a ¯ow chart shown in Fig. 5. The
procedure of this method contains the following
three steps:
Fig. 2. The contour of two overlapped particles.
Fig. 3. Schematic diagram for the extremum points. Fig. 4. Schematic diagram for the extremum points.
24 L. Shen et al. / Pattern Recognition Letters 21 (2000) 21±30
images. Accordingly, only cases 1 and 2 shown in average probability of all other pixels is 0.143, the
Fig. 8 are taken into account. ratio between them is about 4.92. The method is
For cases 1 and 2 in Fig. 8, the distributions of however unable to detect smooth connection of
the probabilities of pixels along the arcs in the two arcs. Fortunately, the smooth connection of
rotation transformation are shown in Figs. 9 and two arcs is seldom found in the present investiga-
10, respectively. From the two ®gures, we can ®nd tion as mentioned above.
that the breakpoints are peaks with much higher
probability values than those of other pixels. In
Fig. 9, the probability of the breakpoint is 0.793 2.2. Clustering arcs by area correlation method
and the average probability of all other pixels is
0.138. In other words, the peak value is more than The contour of a circle may be divided into
®ve times of the average value (5.75). In Fig. 10, several parts after segmentation. In order to cal-
the probability of the breakpoint is 0.704 and the culate the location of its center and its radius, all
circular arcs belonging to the same circle must be
clustered. In the previous method of particle rec-
ognition reported by Yamamoto et al. (1997),
whether two arcs belong to the same circle is de-
termined by the distance between two centers and
the dierence between two radii, i.e. if two arcs
satisfy the following inequalities, they will be re-
garded as belonging to the same circle.
q
2 2
xci ÿ xcj
yci ÿ ycj < c
3
^
jRi ÿ Rj j < r ;
In this paper a new algorithm based on the At the same time, another advantage is that this
cross-correlation method is proposed and a new method needs only one dimensionless parameter
concept of area correlation coecient is de®ned. and this parameter is scale invariant. The over-
Thus whether two circular arcs belong to the same lapped area of two circles can be calculated very
circle or not is judged by the value of their area conveniently by their radii and the distance be-
correlation coecient. The de®nition of the area tween their centers. By the area cross-correlation
correlation coecient of the two arcs is explained method, we can cluster arcs even for a wide range
as follows. of radius variation.
Suppose two arcs are given, say arcs AB and
CD, we can estimate two circles, C1 and C2 to
2.3. Parameter estimation by the Least-Squares
which the two arcs belong, respectively, as shown
Method
in Fig. 11. Their centers and radii are estimated by
a curve ®tting method based on the least-squares
Parameter estimation of a digital arc is the op-
method.
timal estimation of the center and radius. Several
The hatched area is the overlapped part of the
such methods have been reported. Generally
two circles in Fig. 11 and its size can be calculated
speaking, these methods can be classi®ed into two
from the distance between the two centers and the
categories, namely Hough transformation and
sizes of their radii. The area correlation coecient
curve ®tting methods. In this paper, a curve ®tting
Cs of the two dierent arcs is de®ned as follows:
method based on the Least-Squares Method is
So used because it is an accurate and simple algo-
Cs p ;
4
S 1 S2 rithm.
Given a set of coordinates (x1 , y1 ), (x2 , y2 ), . . . ,
where S1 and S2 are the areas of C1 and C2 , re- (xN , yN ), a circle with center (xc , yc ) and radius R is
spectively. So is their overlapped area. de®ned to ®t these pixels. An evaluation function J
We consider that two arcs belong to the same is de®ned as
circle if their area correlation coecient is over a N 2
X
given threshold (0.85 in this paper). The threshold J
R; xc ; yc
2 2
R2 ÿ
xi ÿ xc ÿ
yi ÿ yc :
value is determined by the recognition limit for i1
two overlapped particles. This method overcomes
5
the disadvantage of the previous arc clustering
methods mentioned before. Based on the idea of The function J is minimized with respect to R, xc
the area correlation, the two properties, the center and yc , i.e.,
and the radius, can be taken into account together.
oJ oJ oJ
0; 0; 0:
6
oR oxc oyc
Fig. 12. Sample image. Fig. 13. Recognition result of sample image.
28 L. Shen et al. / Pattern Recognition Letters 21 (2000) 21±30
Table 1
Errors of the recognition
jDrj (pixel) Ddc (pixel) jDrj=r Ddc =r r
Large circles 0.278 0.289 0.0090 0.0087 0.2982
Small circles 0.129 0.359 0.0092 0.0258 0.0927
Fig. 14. Original image of coal-ash, image size: 701 507, 256- Fig. 15. The contours found from the image shown in Fig. 13
gray-level (1 lm 13:74 pixel). and the break points detected by the proposed approach.
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