Automated Nanofiber Diameter Measurement in SEM Images Using a Robust Image Analysis Method

Abstract

Due to the high surface area, porosity, and rigidity, applications of nanofibers and nanosurfaces have developed in recent years. Nanofibers and nanosurfaces are typically produced by electrospinning method. In the production process, determination of average fiber diameter is crucial for quality assessment. Average fiber diameter is determined by manually measuring the diameters of randomly selected fibers on scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images. However, as the number of the images increases, manual fiber diameter determination becomes a tedious and time consuming task as well as being sensitive to human errors. Therefore, an automated fiber diameter measurement system is desired. In the literature, this task is achieved by using image analysis algorithms. Typically, these methods first isolate each fiber in the image and measure the diameter of each isolated fiber. Fiber isolation is an error-prone process. In this study, automated calculation of nanofiber diameter is achieved without fiber isolation using image processing and analysis algorithms. Performance of the proposed method was tested on real data. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown by comparing automatically and manually measured nanofiber diameter values.

Nanofibers are a matter of perspective: effects of methodology and subjectivity on diameter measurements

“…† Some studies compared the results of automated versus human diameter measurements (usually to validate the former) and mostly found good agreement, oen emphasizing signicant advantages in labor intensity and reproducibility. 22,24,32,40 Such studies usually focus on over-ideal cases of high resolution, high contrast SEM images of monodisperse, narrowly distributed ber diameters on a discernible clear background. Non-Gaussian diameter distributions and suboptimal micrograph resolution are, however, likely to introduce systematic errors, as real diameter measurements deviating from the normal distribution are indistinguishable from noise.…”

Damage detection on antarctic ice shelves using the normalised radon transform

“…where 𝐼(𝑥, 𝑦) denotes the value of the image intensity at (𝑥, 𝑦) coordinates, and 𝛿 is the delta Dirac function (Oppenheim and Willsky, 1996;Öznergiz et al, 2014). The range of the transform coordinates is a half circle (0 ≤ 𝜃 < 𝜋).…”

An Adaptable Device for Scalable Electrospinning of Low- and High-Viscosity Solutions

“…Each fiber was only measured once at the largest diameter along sections with clear edge pairs. The work of Öznergiz et al describe a similar application of edge finding to nanofiber analysis [38]. The edges of the fibers are diffuse in the micrographs, which adds uncertainty as to where the physical edge of the fiber begins.…”