Application of direct tracking method for measuring electrospun nanofiber diameter

In this paper, direct tracking method as an image analysis based technique for measuring electrospun nanofiber diameter has been presented and compared with distance transform method. Samples with known characteristics generated using a simulation scheme known as μ-randomness were employed to evaluate the accuracy of the method. Electrospun webs of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) were also used to verify the applicability of the method on real samples. Since direct tracking as well as distance transform require binary input images, micrographs of the electrospun webs obtained from Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) were first converted to black and white using local thresholding. Direct tracking resulted in more accurate estimations of fiber diameter for simulated images as well as electrospun webs suggesting the usefulness of the method for electrospun nanofiber diameter measurement.