Image analysis for measuring rod network properties

Abstract In recent years, metallic nanowires have been attracting significant attention as next-generation flexible transparent conductive films. The performance of films depends on the network structure created by nanowires. Gaining an understanding of their structure, such as connectivity, coverage, and alignment of nanowires, requires the knowledge of individual nanowires inside the microscopic images taken from the film. Although nanowires are flexible up to a certain extent, they are usually depicted as rigid rods in many analysis and computational studies. Herein, we propose a simple and straightforward algorithm based on the filtering in the frequency domain for detecting the rod-shape objects inside binary images. The proposed algorithm uses a specially designed filter in the frequency domain to detect image segments, namely, the connected components aligned in a certain directio…