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Feature Shape Descriptors

This interactive tutorial illustrates typical procedures for measuring the shapes of objects. In the tutorial, measurement of roundness is used to characterize the shape of starch granules, while a correlation between formfactor and size for the powder sample indicates that the larger particles are actually agglomerates of smaller ones and that this accounts for their more irregular shapes. There is an almost unlimited number of combinations of size measurements for which the dimensions formally cancel, and any of these may be useful in a particular situation, if one can be found.

The tutorial initializes with a randomly selected specimen appearing in the Specimen Image window. The Choose A Specimen pull-down menu provides a selection of images, in addition to the initial randomly chosen one. The Original button shows the original image. The Leveled button corrects nonuniform illumination and the Thresholded button shows the binary image produced by brightness thresholding, while the Processed button shows the result of morphological processing to remove noise, fill holes, separate touching features, etc. as required by each image. The Measured button shows outlines around each feature superimposed on the original image for reference. The Results button shows a summary of the measurement results.

Contributing Authors

John C. Russ - Materials Science and Engineering Dept., North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, 27695.

Matthew Parry-Hill, and Michael W. Davidson - National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, 1800 East Paul Dirac Dr., The Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, 32310.


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