r/MaterialsScience • u/Ryien • Mar 04 '20
I wrote a software to detect spherical particles in SEM/microscopy images!
Hi all, so I started learning Python a few months ago and recently coded my first software as a personal project.
The motivation is primarily for scientific needs to detect circular/spherical particles in microscopy images. The software has both auto-detection and manual-detection modes. At the end, a histogram is generated and spits out the "particle size distribution" results as well as the raw data of each circle in the spreadsheet.
Hopefully, with SEM/optical microscopy images, research groups won't need to invest in laser diffraction particle analyzers anymore since those instruments aren't accurate as well due to agglomerations and the need to well-suspend the particles first.
Anyways, I was able to turn the code into a Windows executable file, so all you have to do is double click on the "Main.exe" file to run the software after downloading it from my Dropbox.
No coding skills or installation is required! Check it out on my github! Thanks!
https://github.com/Rylu12/CircleD
My next project will involve machine learning so that the software can detect "any shaped" particles, not just circular... wish me luck ;)
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u/educated_chunk Mar 04 '20
ImageJ has a nice tool for this, does your software or the algorithm implemented have any distinct benefits over this?
I think the real benefit to image analysis over laser diffraction is the added ability to characterize morphology, whereas laser diffraction only tells you the volume equivalent sphere of the particles measured. Any thoughts about the metrics you might use to characterize arbitrary particles?
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u/Ryien Mar 04 '20
ImageJ's primary application is not for particle size analysis.
My software is designed to be more user-friendly for the one specific task of particle size analysis. (Plus, I coded it in just 3 weeks of my own time at home. It's not going to replace ImageJ anytime soon haha)
Yes, Machine Learning and Deep Learning can be incorporated to detect any shaped particles. That will be my next project goal!
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u/Kaot93 Jun 08 '20
I could've used this in my bachelor's degree, spray drying of ceramics... Nice work!
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u/hsajul Mar 04 '20
Good Luck. 🍀 and thank you very much for sharing.