title: Evaluation of a low-cost automatic counting system for nuclear track detectors.
abstract: This paper describes a low-cost automatic counting system for recognising and counting microscopic track holes in plastic nuclear track detectors. The hardware includes an Olympus BH2 microscope, (manufactured by the Olympus Optical Company, Japan) a Philips resistive gate sensor (RGS) board, (manufactured by the Philips Company, Netherlands) a frame-grabber board and an IBM PC compatible. The RGS board acts like a camera, sending analog video signals of the microscope's field image to the frame-grabber, which produces a digital image with a resolution of 256 x 256 pixels and 128 grey levels in about 20 ms. This is then stored in either one of two 64K on-board RAMs for processing by the PC. The software is menu-driven and allows image grabbing, saving, loading and processing. The image processing can be divided into three parts namely: segmentation, speckle elimination and the removal of ill-formed track holes. In this paper we will present the results of testing the system with sample images obtained from CR-39 plastic nuclear track detectors. The limitations of the system for counting track holes on these detectors will be discussed.
authors.affiliation: School of Physics, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.
authors.forename: C F
authors.initials: CF
authors.lastname: Wong
authors.forename: H W
authors.initials: HW
authors.lastname: Wong
authors.forename: P W
authors.initials: PW
authors.lastname: Tsang
mesh_terms: D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D009686:Nuclear Physics / Q000191:economics / Q000295:instrumentation*; D012588:Scintillation Counting / Q000191:economics / Q000295:instrumentation*; D012984:Software / Q000191:economics