A morphological approach to the automatic detection of dark fringes applied to birefringence images

摘要

This work presents a novel approach to detect automatically the position of dark fringes in birefringence images. These positions are important for rheology (study of the flow of matter) applications, as they allow indirect measurements of physical properties of molten polymers without having to interact with the material. Our approach uses mathematical morphology techniques to find the patterns that characterize the fringes and detect the center position of each one of them. The results are compared with manual measurements, revealing the superior precision of our method. They have also been applied to the calculation of the stress field of some polymers with good results.