A study on the reproducibility of counting vesicles in volcanic rocks

Vesicle size distributions in two and three dimensions of two samples were independently measured by three different researchers to investigate whether or not such measurements are reproducible. Additionally, two different software programs were used to measure the three-dimensional vesicle size distributions: the 3D Object Counter plugin for ImageJ and Blob3D. Manual thresholding by each of the authors produced similar results for both samples using both programs; however, use of the automatic, maximum entropy technique for thresholding produced measurably different results because it did not discriminate between vesicles and plagioclase crystals in one case and between vesicles and some cracks in another. Use of asymmetric erosion and dilation processes on the images is shown to affect the vesicle size distribution, but it does not have a significant effect on the power-law exponent that describes intermediate-sized vesicles or on the vesicle number density in these samples. However, such a technique is not recommended.