Segmentation of scanning electron microscopy images from natural rubber samples with gold nanoparticles using starlet wavelets
This work addresses a domain-specific issue for materials science researchers by providing an incremental improvement in image segmentation for nanoparticle analysis.
The paper tackled the problem of segmenting scanning electron microscopy images to locate gold nanoparticles in natural rubber membranes, achieving an accuracy greater than 85% for all test images.
Electronic microscopy has been used for morphology evaluation of different materials structures. However, microscopy results may be affected by several factors. Image processing methods can be used to correct and improve the quality of these results. In this paper we propose an algorithm based on starlets to perform the segmentation of scanning electron microscopy images. An application is presented in order to locate gold nanoparticles in natural rubber membranes. In this application, our method showed accuracy greater than 85% for all test images. Results given by this method will be used in future studies, to computationally estimate the density distribution of gold nanoparticles in natural rubber samples and to predict reduction kinetics of gold nanoparticles at different time periods.