Automatic detection and tracking of dust particles in a RF plasma sheath

Abstract: A method enabling automatic detection and tracking of large amounts of individual dust particles in plasmas is presented. Individual trajectories can be found with a good spatiotemporal resolution, even without applying any external light source to facilitate detection. Main advantages of this method is a high portability and the possibility of making statistical analyses of the trajectories of a large amount of non uniformly size distributed particles, under challenging illumination conditions and with low time and computational resources. In order to evaluate the efficiency of different detection and tracking strategies statistically, an experimental benchmark is proposed, and completed by numerical simulations.