Automated Analysis of Spider Silk Images

Abstract: Spider silk is a fascinating material with manyinteresting properties. Silk has many applications, but there areassociated challenges with producing it using spiders. Researchis done in order to find a way to create synthetic spider silkstructures using super hydrophobic surfaces. After this processit is important to evaluate the silk growth on the surface. Thishas to be done by taking images and the task for this projectis to develop a program that is capable of analyse them. Toevaluate the surface, images are taken using a scanning electronmicroscope (SEM) or a fluorescence microscope. Then the imagesare analysed using the program. The program analyses theimages using different methods involving contrast comparisonin order to accomplish the objective. The result is a programwritten in Matlab that is able to detect the size and direction ofthe nanowires on the surface.