Automatic analysis of 2D foam sequences: Application to the characterization of aqueous proteins foams stability

Aqueous foams occur in several industrial applications including food production. One of the challenging issues in foams study is to evaluate the air bubbles stability. This problem is addressed in the present work using sequences of 2D macroscopic images of aqueous foams carried out in a glass column. Despite commercial softwares that are currently used in microscopy, the automatic analysis of foam sequences is still an unsolved problem. It can be related to two fundamental problems in the field of image analysis: the granulometric analysis and the automatic tracking of objects in image sequences. Rather than an adaptation of existing granulometric or tracking methods, the proposed foam analyzer consists in a new algorithm based on a double tracking of the foam bubbles: a scale-space tracking, where the scale parameter is the size, and a temporal tracking. It ensures a complete description of any bubble through the time and the detection of any bubbles interaction so that the foam's structure is finally entirely and very precisely described. The proposed foam analyzer has been validated by comparing the characteristics computed by the automatic method to those that can be predicted via the foams physical propel-ties. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.