Application of Image Processing to Determine Size Distribution of Magnetic Nanoparticles

Digital image processing has increasingly been implemented in nanostructural analysis and would be an ideal tool to characterize the morphology and position of self-assembled magnetic nanoparticles for high density recording. In this work, magnetic nanoparticles were synthesized by the modified polyol process using $Fe(acac)_3$ and $Pt(acac)_2$ as starting materials. Transmission electron microscope (TEM) images of as-synthesized products were inspected using an image processing procedure. Grayscale images ($800{\times}800$ pixels, 72 dot per inch) were converted to binary images by using Otsu's thresholding. Each particle was then detected by using the closing algorithm with disk structuring elements of 2 pixels, the Canny edge detection, and edge linking algorithm. Their centroid, diameter and area were subsequently evaluated. The degree of polydispersity of magnetic nanoparticles can then be compared using the size distribution from this image processing procedure.