A method for recognizing particles in overlapped particle Images

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 coefficient 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 effective in recognizing the overlapped circles with high accuracy. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.