Hi Muhammed,

Our new software MIPAR at http://MIPAR.us can definitely help you. Is this the micrograph you need a grain boundary map of? It looks like it's already been done so I am guessing it is just an example. If you could send me a micrograph you need the boundaries extracted from, I'd be happy to make you a recipe file for it and send it to for you to run in your copy.

Cheers,

John

Hi Muhammed,

I went ahead and made a recipe for the automated grain segmentation of your attached image - hopefully it is useful for future images. I have attached visual segmentation results, the recipe file you can load into MIPAR, and a screen recording demonstrating the recipe steps. Let me know of any questions or thoughts!

Cheers,

John

Nice post John. I got a test license of MIPAR, but I havenot tried it yet. As for the image processing, can MIPAR output the radial distance distribution of the disc particles?

Muhammad, and Xinfu Gu;

You can use a free software too, named: "ImageJ". I used it to get and extract the grain boundary map and also the radial distance distribution and every statistics I need for my project. You can follow simple toturials to use it.

Ahmed Izem Amazigh.

Hi All,

Thanks for the kind words Xinfu. We are working now to add support for measuring the RDF and expect it to be in beta.5 of MIPAR. User experience is at the top of MIPAR's priorities, and we wanted to carefully incorporate direct distribution measurements like RDF into MIPAR's framework to preserve its high quality user experience. For now, you can export a list of centroid positions of all features, and with very simple codes in MATLAB or even Excel (and yes ImageJ), calculate the RDF from this list. 

ImageJ is great as a free solution to some problems, but most of MIPAR's users are actually former ImageJ users who did not find its tools robust or user friendly enough. Every user is free to choose the best tools for their research, so thank you Abbad for mentioning ImageJ as an option. If commercial processing tools are out of the question, that is understood, but so much money is spent on data acquisition (instruments + fabrication + sample prep), that users do need to think carefully about the logic of wanting to professionally process $1000-$1,000,000 worth of data, with tools that cost $0.

Cheers,

John

Hey!

Is ImageJ can specify the parameters of grains? minimum size, largest and average size? In the case of the two-phase structure it is possible to distinguish these structures?

Robert Owsiński, ImageJ can specify all the parameter you need: area, perimeter max and min size too. For two phases structure, you can process the image and apply a color filter for exemple and a condition to separate the two phases, take a look at the tutorials!  I know that it's possible.

Hi Robert,

ImageJ is definitely an option for you. If you post an example I can also make a MIPAR recipe that will do it all automaticaly. Just load it and you're done. It is also very educational since you can easily track what each step did and make changes if necessary. Ask our users and they will echo these sentiments.

Cheers,

John

Hi everyone,

Actually, ImageJ/Fiji can do everything you need, provided you know exacctly what you want to do and how to get it. Which means that you have to spend some time exploring its (far too) numerous functions.

MIPAR seems more user friendly, but again, unless you have someone designing the process for you, as John is proposing here, there is no other way than having a rather precise idea of the operators you are going to need for your images (in Muhammad's case: background filter, grayscale reconstruction for getting rid of the precipitates, watershed to close the grains).

Nicolas

Hi Nicolas,

Thanks for your post. You are quite right, designing the image processing pipeline (i.e. recipe) is always the most challenging task, if not THE task, regardless of software choice. MIPAR tries to make this as easy as possible by fully preserving the history and facilitating modifications, but this always requires work. We are working on adding more AI into MIPAR to have recipes proposed automatically. This is somewhat of the holy grail and is certainly a long way off. That said, the fact that MIPAR allows a user to send a more experienced user (even one internal to their company) an image, have that user create a recipe (or modify an existing one), and send it back for the first user to load and explore, is what so many like about MIPAR so far. We have found this model greatly accelerates the education of users as to what their specific operators need to be for their research. We are also working on a community-populated recipe repository.

As you note, anyone is welcome to use ImageJ. We just want to expose as many as possible to a more user-friendly alternative.

Cheers,

John

Hi John:

How are you doing?

I am wondering if MIPAR is able to retrieve three dihedral angles

associated with a triple junction?

Rongpei

Hi Rongpei!

Doing well thanks for asking! Yes it can. Do you have an example image you are interested in? I can post a solution here.

Cheers,

John