Image Analysis of Polymer-Dispersed Liquid Crystals

The quantitative analysis of the Polymer-Dispersed Liquid Crystals is generally difficult because the liquid crystal droplets do not appear as complete 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 acquired image. In this method, the longest chord of an incomplete circle is found 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 procedure is repeated for all the droplets. Once all the circles have been completed, standard image analysis is carried out to compute the geometrical features of the image. The present method can also treat a difficult to handle problem, i.e., the appearance of broken circles, which is a common feature. For this purpose, some manual video editing has been suggested, whereby the broken pieces that appear to be the part of a given droplet are connected to each other.