High-accuracy particle sizing by interferometric particle imaging

Abstract A method of high-accuracy estimation of fringes number/fringes frequency of interferogram based on erosion match and the Fourier transform technique is proposed. The edge images of the interference pattern of particles and the particle mask image are detected respectively by erosion operating firstly and then subtracted with the respective original image, and the center coordinate of particles can be extracted through the 2D correlation operation for the two edge images obtained. The interference pattern of each particle can then be achieved using the center coordinate, the shape and size of the particle image. The number of fringes/fringe spacing of the interferogram of the particle is extracted by Fourier transform and the modified Rife algorithm, and sub-pixel accuracy of the extracted frequency is acquired. Its performance is demonstrated by numerical simulation and experimental measurement. The measurement uncertainty is ±0.91 μm and the relative error 1.13% for the standard particle of diameter 45 μm. The research results show that the algorithm presented boasts high accuracy for particle sizing as well as location measurement.