Accurate Stereo-Vision-Based Flying Droplet Volume Measurement Method

Accurate volume measurement of flying droplets in the Mura-free manufacturing of inkjet printed organic light-emitting diodes (IJP OLEDs) remains a challenge due to the micrometer scale and high speeds of the droplets. Most existing vision-based methods pay little attention to image segmentation and estimate the droplet volume based on a symmetry assumption, which yields poor accuracy, especially for droplets with an unknown shape. In this article, an accurate measurement method for flying droplet volume based on stereo vision is proposed. First, an image acquisition technique based on stereo vision and synchronous triggering is used to obtain multiview high-resolution droplet images. Then, an accurate binocular droplet image segmentation algorithm is proposed to segment the images with different degrees of blur to achieve similar accuracy. Finally, a polar-coordinate-Hermite-interpolation-based droplet reconstruction (PHDR) algorithm is proposed to reconstruct droplets and to calculate volume on the basis of the contours obtained by the binocular droplet image segmentation algorithm without any symmetry assumptions. The droplet measurement system (DMS) is set up, and a series of experiments are conducted to verify the performance of the proposed method. The results show the advantages of our algorithms, that the volume measurement accuracy is +/- 3%, and that the relative standard uncertainty is better than 2.1%.

Automated summary

This article proposes an accurate measurement method for the volume of flying droplets based on stereo vision. The method uses a technique for acquiring high-resolution droplet images from multiple viewpoints and an accurate binocular droplet image segmentation algorithm to reconstruct and calculate the droplet volume without any symmetry assumptions. The results show a high measurement accuracy and low relative standard uncertainty.