Pattern Recognition Letters 21 (2000) 2130

www.elsevier.nl/locate/patrec

A method for recognizing particles in overlapped particle

images
Liping Shen a,*, Xiangqun Song a, Manabu Iguchi b, Fujio Yamamoto a
a
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Fukui University, 3-9-1 Bunkyo, Fukui 910-8507, Japan
b
Division of Materials Science and Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Hokkaido University, Kita 13 Nishi 8, Kita-ku,
Sapporo 060-8628, Japan
Received 8 June 1998; received in revised form 6 September 1999

Abstract

This paper describes a new method to divide a planar curve into circular arcs in order to recognize the overlapped
particles in an image. The segmentation is based on a new breakpoint detection method. An area correlation coecient
for two arcs is introduced to identify and cluster the arcs belonging to the same circle. The Least-Squares Method is
applied to estimate the center of a circle and its radius. The present method is evaluated using a computer-generated
sample image and real coal-ash images with heavily overlapped particles taken by an electron microscope. All the
results showed that the present method is eective in recognizing the overlapped circles with high accuracy. 2000
Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Circular arc detection; Segmentation of planar curve; Recognition of overlapped circles; Breakpoint detection.

1. Introduction which can be considered the best one because the

Problems concerning the detection of circular
arcs from a planar curve have attracted much at-
tention in the elds of pattern recognition and
computer vision for many years, because a seg-
mented arc can provide us with a meaningful and
compact form with which we can analyze many
round objects. However, as reported by Melen and
Ozanian (1993), curve segmentation is the task of
grouping elements of a curve according to some
criteria and there will not be a unique algorithm
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: +81-776-27-8755; fax: +81-
776-27-8534.
E-mail address: sheng@fv.mech.fukui-u.ac.jp (L. Shen).
task is not a generic one, but depends on the
purpose of the segmentation. Thus, many algo-
rithms for arc extraction have been developed in
the past. Among these methods, the most con-
ventional method was the circular arc detection
based on the Hough transformation (Duda and
Hart, 1972; Kierkegaard, 1992; Pei and Horng,
1995). However, the accuracy of the Hough
transformation depends on the computational
complexity. Moreover, in practice, a number of
points have to be accumulated in the parameter
space in order to construct peaks and well-dened
peaks are often hard to obtain. The Hough
transformation also suers from the storage
problem (Yuen and Feng, 1996). Besides Hough
transformation, the other methods are based on

0167-8655/00/$ - see front matter 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 1 6 7 - 8 6 5 5 ( 9 9 ) 0 0 1 3 0 - 0
22 L. Shen et al. / Pattern Recognition Letters 21 (2000) 2130
the detection of breakpoint. Most breakpoint de-
tection methods are based on the identication of
curvature extrema (Pla, 1996; Lim et al., 1995).
But all these methods have the disadvantages of
sensitivity to noise and their dependence on pa-
rameters that are chosen empirically. In image
processing the contours of round objects are not
smooth curves but a digital form of them. There-
fore the curvature of a curve cannot be calculated
accurately. In order to calculate the approximate
curvature, the curve rst has to be smoothed.
Unfortunately, although the smoothing process
makes it possible to calculate curvature of a curve,
it cannot assure the accuracy of the result, espe-
cially near the breakpoints. Furthermore, some
important information will be lost during
smoothing process. For example, the smoothing
process will make the corners on the curve blunt
and more dicult to detect. In our previous work
(Yamamoto et al., 1997), we adopted the method
reported by Pla (1996), but the results were not
satisfactory. One of our earlier results is shown in
Fig. 1. In some method of this class, the curvature
is not calculated based on the contour directly but
the chain-coded contour. In the method reported
by Teh and Chin (1989), not only the curvatures of
points but also the region of support of them are
taken into accounted. In the paper reported by
Sanchize et al. (1998), the classical operations were
substituted by a neural network and the dominant
points were detected by the outputs of the net-
work. Another kind of method worthy of being
Fig. 1. One of the results in our previous work.
mentioned is the iterative method, such as those
reported by Rosin and West (1995), Sakaue (1982)
and Sakaue and Takagi (1983). Although the it-
erative method has many advantages, such as non-
parametric, invariant to transformations, simple
and generic, the curve will inevitably be divided
into too many segments and which will increase
the diculty of clustering and thus increase the
computational time.
This paper presents a new method to recognize
overlapped round particles in images. The method
includes the following three steps:
1. detecting the edge of overlapped particles,
2. dividing the edge into circular arcs,
3. grouping the circular arcs belonging to the
same circle.
The present paper focuses on the second and
the third steps of the method. A new method,
which is based on the detection of breakpoint, is
introduced to divide a digital curve into circular
arcs at rst. The identication of breakpoints de-
pends on the probabilities of pixels on a curve as
extremum points during a rotational transforma-
tion which will be explained in detailed in Section
2.1. The pixels with high probability are consid-
ered as breakpoints. The area correlation method
is introduced to cluster the circular arcs belonging
to the same circle. Canny's method (Canny, 1986)
was adopted to detect the edge of overlapped
particles in the paper.
The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2,
we introduce our method of circle recognition
from an overlapped particle image. The section
includes three parts, i.e. curve segmentation, arc
clustering and parameter estimation. An examina-
tion of this method on a computer-generated im-
age and its application on coal-ash image are given
in Section 3.
2. Method of separation
2.1. Breakpoint detection by rotating curve
After applying Canny's method to an over-
lapped particle image, the edges of particles in the
image can be obtained. Linking these edge pixels,
we can obtain the curves of particles' contours.
 L. Shen et al. / Pattern Recognition Letters 21 (2000) 2130
Each such curve may include several arcs which
belong to dierent circles if it is the contour of
some overlapped circles. An example is shown in
Fig. 2, such a curve should be divided into several
circular arcs.
A key to segmenting a planar digital curve into
circular arcs is to determine the breakpoints,
namely joint pixels of dierent arcs on the curve.
An example of such curves is shown in Fig. 3. Here
we can nd that the joint pixels are all located on
sharp corners of the curve, i.e., on local extremum
points. Suppose we describe the curve with a series
of pixels, and the coordinates of these pixels are
designated by (x1 , y1 ), (x2 , y2 ), . . . , (xN , yN ). A joint
pixel (xi , yi ) satises the following conditions:
xi1 6 xi P xi1 _ xi1 P xi 6 xi1
_ yi1 6 yi P yi1 _ yi1 P yi 6 yi1 : 1 joint point will have a high probability of being an
Here, 2 6 i 6 N 1, and N is the number of pixels
on the curve.
A pixel (xi , yi ) is called a local extremum point if
it satises the above conditions. It is obvious that
all joint pixels are local extremum points. But not
all local extremum points are joint pixels. For ex-
ample, on the curve in Fig. 3, there are six local
extremum points, i.e. point BG, but only two
Fig. 2. The contour of two overlapped particles.
Fig. 3. Schematic diagram for the extremum points.
23
points are joint pixels among these extremum
points, i.e., point D and point G. Therefore, the
breakpoints cannot be identied by only nding
the local extremum points. Fortunately, these local
extremum points will have dierent properties
when the curve is rotated by a small angle.
As shown in Fig. 4, the curve is rotated by a
small angle centered on the point A (the dotted
curve is its original position). After rotating, we
can nd that some of the local extremum points on
the original curve are no longer local extremum
points on the rotated curve, such as points B, C, E
and F. However, the joint pixels, point D and G,
still satisfy Eq. (1). In other words, they keep the
status of local extremum points after the rotation
process. If we rotate the curve continuously and
record the local extremum points at every step, the
extremum point during the whole rotation process.
This dierent properties between joint pixels and
other pixels during rotation is the key point in our
new method.
In the present method the curve is rotated by a
small angle step continuously from 0 to 360.
During the rotation process, a true joint pixel on
the curve will appear as a local extremum point
with a very high probability. According to our
numerical experiments for a joint pixel, its prob-
ability of being a local extremum point is about
four to ve times of the average probability. The
situation will be shown later (in Figs. 9 and 10).
The whole detection process of joint points is
represented by a ow chart shown in Fig. 5. The
procedure of this method contains the following
three steps:
Fig. 4. Schematic diagram for the extremum points.
24 L. Shen et al. / Pattern Recognition Letters 21 (2000) 2130

Fig. 6. The contours of two overlapped particles.

Fig. 6 shows three possible cases of the contour

of two overlapped circles. In case (a) circle A
overlaps circle B and in case (b) circle B overlaps
circle A. These two cases appear when circles A
and B have dierent brightness. Case (c) appears
when two circles have the same or very similar
brightness. From these cases, we see that there are
only two basic congurations of joint of two arcs
after T-junctions are deleted. A T-junction is
something like that shown in Fig. 7 and deleting of
a T-junction means breaking the contour at the
point of intersection. The congurations are
Fig. 5. Overview of the joint points detection. shown in Fig. 8.
Cases 1 and 2 are two basic congurations for a
joint of two dierent arcs in the contours of two
Step 1. Initialize a counter for every pixel and overlapped circles. A smooth connection appears
rotation angel h. when two circles are tangent to each other. The
Step 2. Rotate the curve by the rotation angle h smooth connection is a special example of case 1
according to the following expression: or case 2, but it is a rare case in overlapped particle
xti xi cos h yi sin h;
2
yti xi sin h yi cos h:

Then identify all the extremum points on the ro-

tated curve. If a pixel is found to be an extremum
point, its corresponding counter is increased by 1.
Step 3. Repeat step 2 by rotating the curve from
0 to 360 with step Dh, the angle interval Dh is 2
in the present investigation, and the number of
times all pixels occur as extremum points in the
transformation are recorded in their correspond- Fig. 7. An example of T-junctions.
ing counters. The probability of a pixel as an
extremum point during rotation is dened as the
ratio of the counted number of the extremum
point to the total number of rotations.
In order to show the identication capability of
breakpoints by this method, numerical experi-
ments were performed on two basic congurations
of a joint of two dierent arcs appears on the
contour of two overlapped circles. Fig. 8. The congurations of the joint of two arcs.
 L. Shen et al. / Pattern Recognition Letters 21 (2000) 2130
images. Accordingly, only cases 1 and 2 shown in
Fig. 8 are taken into account.
For cases 1 and 2 in Fig. 8, the distributions of
the probabilities of pixels along the arcs in the
rotation transformation are shown in Figs. 9 and
10, respectively. From the two gures, we can nd
that the breakpoints are peaks with much higher
probability values than those of other pixels. In
Fig. 9, the probability of the breakpoint is 0.793
and the average probability of all other pixels is
0.138. In other words, the peak value is more than
ve times of the average value (5.75). In Fig. 10,
the probability of the breakpoint is 0.704 and the
Fig. 9. The probability along the curve of case 1 in Fig. 8.
Fig. 10. The probability along the curve of case 2 in Fig. 8.
25
average probability of all other pixels is 0.143, the
ratio between them is about 4.92. The method is
however unable to detect smooth connection of
two arcs. Fortunately, the smooth connection of
two arcs is seldom found in the present investiga-
tion as mentioned above.
2.2. Clustering arcs by area correlation method
The contour of a circle may be divided into
several parts after segmentation. In order to cal-
culate the location of its center and its radius, all
circular arcs belonging to the same circle must be
clustered. In the previous method of particle rec-
ognition reported by Yamamoto et al. (1997),
whether two arcs belong to the same circle is de-
termined by the distance between two centers and
the dierence between two radii, i.e. if two arcs
satisfy the following inequalities, they will be re-
garded as belonging to the same circle.
q 
2 2
xci xcj yci ycj < c
3
^ jRi Rj j < r ;
where xc ; yc are the coordinates of the circle center,
R is the radius, and c and c are the selected tol-
erances and the subscripts i and j associate to two
dierent arcs. The main idea of the method is that
two arcs can be regarded as belonging to the same
circle if they are very close to each other and their
radii are very similar, i.e. both the distance be-
tween their centers and the dierence between their
radii are very small. However, the selection of the
values of c and r is very dicult in this method
because they depend on the size of the clustered
arcs. Obviously a xed tolerance is not suitable for
clustering all arcs whose radii vary a lot. In fact,
this method is applicable only for clustering the
arcs with similar radii. If the variation of the radii
is wide, this algorithm is not proper for our clus-
tering purpose. The disadvantage of this method is
that it considers the distance between the centers
of two arcs and the dierence between their radii in
separately. In fact, whether two arcs belong to the
same circle or not depends on both properties and
their relationship.
26 L. Shen et al. / Pattern Recognition Letters 21 (2000) 2130

In this paper a new algorithm based on the At the same time, another advantage is that this
cross-correlation method is proposed and a new method needs only one dimensionless parameter
concept of area correlation coecient is dened. and this parameter is scale invariant. The over-
Thus whether two circular arcs belong to the same lapped area of two circles can be calculated very
circle or not is judged by the value of their area conveniently by their radii and the distance be-
correlation coecient. The denition of the area tween their centers. By the area cross-correlation
correlation coecient of the two arcs is explained method, we can cluster arcs even for a wide range
as follows. of radius variation.
Suppose two arcs are given, say arcs AB and
CD, we can estimate two circles, C1 and C2 to
2.3. Parameter estimation by the Least-Squares
which the two arcs belong, respectively, as shown
Method
in Fig. 11. Their centers and radii are estimated by
a curve tting method based on the least-squares
Parameter estimation of a digital arc is the op-
method.
timal estimation of the center and radius. Several
The hatched area is the overlapped part of the
such methods have been reported. Generally
two circles in Fig. 11 and its size can be calculated
speaking, these methods can be classied into two
from the distance between the two centers and the
categories, namely Hough transformation and
sizes of their radii. The area correlation coecient
curve tting methods. In this paper, a curve tting
Cs of the two dierent arcs is dened as follows:
method based on the Least-Squares Method is
So used because it is an accurate and simple algo-
Cs p ; 4
S 1
S2 rithm.
Given a set of coordinates (x1 , y1 ), (x2 , y2 ), . . . ,
where S1 and S2 are the areas of C1 and C2 , re- (xN , yN ), a circle with center (xc , yc ) and radius R is
spectively. So is their overlapped area. dened to t these pixels. An evaluation function J
We consider that two arcs belong to the same is dened as
circle if their area correlation coecient is over a N  2
X
given threshold (0.85 in this paper). The threshold J R; xc ; yc
2 2
R2 xi xc yi yc :
value is determined by the recognition limit for i1
two overlapped particles. This method overcomes 5
the disadvantage of the previous arc clustering
methods mentioned before. Based on the idea of The function J is minimized with respect to R, xc
the area correlation, the two properties, the center and yc , i.e.,
and the radius, can be taken into account together.
oJ oJ oJ
0; 0; 0: 6
oR oxc oyc

Solving Eq. (6), xc , yc and R are given by the fol-

lowing expressions:
c1 b2 c2 b1
xc ;
a 1 b 2 a2 b 1
a1 c2 a2 c1
yc ;
a 1 b 2 a2 b 1
X X X
R2 x2i 2xc xi Nx2c yi2
X 
2yc yi Nyc2 =N : 7
Fig. 11. The area correlation of two circles.
 L. Shen et al. / Pattern Recognition Letters 21 (2000) 2130 27

Here, The new proposed method was applied to ex-

 X  X  tract the circles from the sample image. The ex-
2
a1 2 xi N x2i ; tracted result is shown in Fig. 13. There are 72
X X X  large circles and 72 small circles, respectively. All
a2 b1 2 xi yi N xi yi ; the particles' center locations and radii were rec-
 X  X  ognized with high accuracy in the sample image.
2
b2 2 yi N yi2 ; Table 1 lists the recognition errors of this
X X X X X X method. In the table, Dr stands for the radius
c1 x2i xi N x3i xi yi2 N xi yi2 ;
X X X X X X dierence between the original circle and the cor-
c2 x2i yi N yi3 yi yi2 N x2i yi : responding extracted circle, Ddc denotes the center
P dierence, and r is the standard variance of radius.
denotes the sum for i from 1 to N. An over bar denotes the average value. Two rows
list the values for the large circles and the small
circles, respectively. The rst two columns list the
3. Results average dierences of the radius and center loca-
tion in pixel, and the last two list the non-dimen-
3.1. The processing of computer-generated image sional averaged values. Both the absolute errors of
the radius and center dierences for either large
In order to test the recognition performance of circles or small circles are within 0:5 pixel and the
our recognition method, or referred to as the rec- relative errors of large circles are less than 1%.
ognition accuracy, a computer-generated sample Even for the small circles, the relative error of
image was processed. Two kinds of circles were center dierence is less than 3%. From the simu-
drawn in the image, as shown in Fig. 12. The ra- lation, we can conclude that (1) the rate of correct
dius of the large circles is 32 pixels and that of the extraction is fairly high and (2) the accuracy of the
small circles is 14 pixels. In the image, particles extracted circle is very high.
with the same diameter are arranged in a compact
hexagonal pacing, and the large particles and the 3.2. Particle recognition of coal-ash image
small particles are overlapped densely. Every large
particle is tangent to all its neighboring large The images of coal-ash (name: Blair Athol) ta-
particles and is overlapped by three small particles. ken by an electron microscope were investigated
The gray-levels of these two kinds of circles are 64 using the present method. Fig. 14 is an original
for the large circles and 192 for the small circles. coal-ash image of 701  507 pixels with a 256-
The only purpose of this examination is to evalu- gray-level. A total of 20 images were processed in
ate the present method with a known image. the present investigation.

Fig. 12. Sample image. Fig. 13. Recognition result of sample image.
28 L. Shen et al. / Pattern Recognition Letters 21 (2000) 2130

Table 1
Errors of the recognition
jDrj (pixel) Ddc (pixel) jDrj=r Ddc =r r
Large circles 0.278 0.289 0.0090 0.0087 0.2982
Small circles 0.129 0.359 0.0092 0.0258 0.0927

Fig. 14. Original image of coal-ash, image size: 701  507, 256- Fig. 15. The contours found from the image shown in Fig. 13
gray-level (1 lm 13:74 pixel). and the break points detected by the proposed approach.

In the images, both the sizes and gray-levels of

particles varied widely. The diameters of some
`larger particles' are more than 60 pixels, while
some `smaller particles' are less than 5 pixels. The
gray-levels of particles showed a similar situation
where the dierence between the `brightest' parti-
cle and the `darkest' particles exceeds 100. For
such images, the conventional approaches of circle
recognition cannot provide us with a satisfactory
result.
Fig. 15 shows contours extracted from the
original image of Fig. 14 and the breakpoints de-
tected by the present method are marked on the
contours. From Fig. 16, which is generated by Fig. 16. Extraction result and original image (the extracted
superposing the extracted result on the original circles are drawn on their original image).
image, we can nd that the recognition result is
satisfactory. We can observe that most of the though the present examples are much more
particles were recognized correctly. They are re- complicated, the accuracy of the present method is
covered in the real boundaries of the particles in much higher, and the computation time of the
the image. We can see that only few particles failed present method is less because it is not necessary to
to be detected. These undetected particles are smooth the curves or to calculate the curvature on
usually either too small or too dark. Another ex- curves. Pn
ample of recognition results is given in Fig. 17. The mean
P value dm i1 di =n, the vari-
n 2
Comparing with the result shown in Fig. 1, al- ance r2 i1 di dm =n and the skewness S
 L. Shen et al. / Pattern Recognition Letters 21 (2000) 2130
Fig. 17. Another example of recognition results.
Table 2
Statistical data of recognition
Number dm dm r2
10834 1.95 2.10 1.668
Pn 3 636.
dm =n
r3 of the diameters of particles
i1 di
are very important in analyzing the structures of
coal-ash, where n is the total number of particles.
These values are shown in Table 2. In this paper,
20 images were processed in all and the number of
particles exceeded 10; 000. The mean diameters of
coal-ash agreed favorably with their respective
values (dm ) obtained by the plane sheath ow
method (Miyashita et al., 1996, 1998). In the
method of the plane sheath ow, the image of
particles was taken using a sheath ow technique
in order to avoid overlapping of particles. There-
fore, the number of particles in an image is not as
many as those found in the present method. Since
there are no data available concerning the mea-
surement of particles by image processing, the re-
sults obtained by the plane sheath ow method are
used as the reference data.
4. Conclusions
An integrate method of overlapping circle rec-
ognition is described in this paper and new meth-
ods are introduced for arc segmentation and arc
29
clustering. The main merits of this method are (1)
no smoothing process is needed and (2) the iden-
tication of breakpoint is depended on the geo-
metric congurations of the contours instead of
the derivatives of them. These two properties as-
sure that it is a robust method. Thirdly, the
method is general in corner detection, it can be
extended to divide planar curves into circular arcs
and straight lines segments.
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