Improvement of interfacial tension measurement using a captive bubble in conjunction with axisymmetric drop shape analysis (ADSA)

Axisymmetric drop shape analysis (ADSA) is a method to measure surface tension using drop or bubble profiles. Combining ADSA with a captive bubble configuration (ADSA-CB) facilitates pulmonary surfactant related studies. The accuracy of ADSA-CB is crucially dependent on the quality of the bubble profile extracted from the raw image. In the previous version of ADSA-CB, a global thresholding method was used to segment the bubble profile. However, that technique is of limited accuracy for images with noise and/or lack of contrast. In this paper, a new generation of ADSA-CB using the Canny edge detector was developed. To obtain better results, a novel edge smoothing technique, termed axisymmetric liquid fluid interfaces-smoothing (ALFI-S), was introduced and incorporated with the Canny edge detector to extract bubble profiles. The performance of the new version of ADSA-CB was evaluated using captive bubble images under different conditions. The results suggest that the new methodology is capable of producing accurate surface tension values under a variety of circumstances.