Image analysis of polymer-dispersed liquid crystals

The quantitative analysis of the Polymer-Dispersed Liquid Crystals is gener ally difficult because the liquid crystal droplets do not appear as complet e circles in the optical micrographs. In the present work we have devised a procedure to complete the circular images of the liquid crystals in an acq uired image. In this method, the longest chord of an incomplete circle is f ound by analyzing the edge pixels of the droplet. This chord is then taken as the diameter, and a complete circle is drawn around this diameter. The p rocedure is repeated for all the droplets. Once all the circles have been c ompleted, standard image analysis is carried out to compute the geometrical features of the image. The present method can also treat a difficult to ha ndle problem, i.e., the appearance of broken circles, which is a common fea ture. For this purpose, some manual video editing has been suggested, where by the broken pieces that appear to be the part of a given droplet are conn ected to each other. (C) Elsevier Science Inc., 2000. All rights reserved.