To better understand the mechanism of ejecting spray droplet and raindrop, a high-speed image analysis for droplet characterization technique was proposed in this study. In our design, three basic units containing a high-speed CCD camera, a light source, and automatic image acquisition and data processing unit, are integrated to assess the droplet motion. Next, a set of multistage image processing algorithms, the droplet detection and droplet tracking, were developed and conducted to analyze the droplet trajectories of the grabbed frames. By controlling a very short exposure time, the droplet size and velocity can be obtained to generate the droplet size distribution (DSD). To examine our proposed approaches, a commercially available spray nozzle and raindrop are used to evaluate the effectiveness. Meanwhile, the pair-matching rate is also involved to validate the recognition rate of the droplet tracking algorithm. Using this proposed framework, it can be used to provide valuable data to assess the spray droplet or the precipitation status by their droplet size to droplet velocity.
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