Size measurement and prediction for L-glutamic acid crystal growth during stirred crystallization based on imaging analysis

In this paper, a crystal image analysis method is presented to measure and predict crystal sizes, based on cooling crystallization of β-form L-glutamic acid (LGA) by using an in-situ non-invasive imaging system. The proposed method consists of image restoration, image segmentation, crystal size measurement, and size prediction. To cope with the effects of noise pollution, uneven illumination and movement blurring, the image processing method is conducted for segmenting crystal images captured from the stirring reactor. Thus, the crystal size distribution for crystal population is obtained by using a probability density function. In addition, a short-term prediction method is given for crystal sizes. An experimental study on the cooling crystallization process of β-form LGA is shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.