Abstract:
In order to overcome the shortcomings of the manual method for proton-recoil track recognition in nuclear emulsions, a computer-aided track recognition method was studied. In this method, image sequences captured by a microscope system were processed through image convolution with composite filters, binarization by multi thresholds, track grains clustering and redundant grains removing to recognize the track grains in the image sequences. Then the proton-recoil tracks were reconstructed from the recognized track grains through track reconstruction. The proton-recoil tracks in the nuclear emulsion irradiated by the neutron beam at energy of 14.9 MeV were recognized by the computer-aided method. The results show that proton-recoil tracks reconstructed by this method consist well with those reconstructed by the manual method. This computer-aided track recognition method lays an important technical foundation of developments of a proton-recoil track automatic recognition system and applications of nuclear emulsions in pulsed neutron spectrum measurement.