How do I count fibers?

[Steverino]

I am trying to develop a method for counting fibers. Obviously, counting single fibers is not a problem but counting crossing fibers is more difficult.

One approach is to isolate the ends of the fibers and divide by 2. Is there a way to do this using the image processing and analysis tools available in IMAQ Vision?

Any other ideas?

I have attached a sample image.

Thanks!

[Cameron-T]

I took your image and tried a few things with it in Vision Assistant. I think it would be most helpful to convert the image to a binary image and perform particle analysis on it. This will not distinguish whether there are fibers that cross each other, but I did have a thought of how you can figure that out.

Attached is a script that I put together. I used the Advanced Morphology step to get a Convex Hull of the fibers. From here you could probably use the Particle Analysis to get the areas of each blob (we'll call it). You can then characterize the area of each blob to whether it would be 1, 2, 3 or more fibers (i.e. 1 fiber is <5000 pixels in area, 2 is <15000 pixels, and so on).