Troubleshooting

There are several reasons why no tracks might appear after the Automatic Counting routine has been run, mostly relating to the parameters that need to be set prior to the count being run. If the automatic count appears to run but finishes almost instantaneously it usually indicates that no grains have been selected for counting, that no Region of Interest has been set on each grain, or that the grains have been locked.

If Automatic Counting has been run but no tracks (or any other features) appear in the Overlay, then check the following:

  1. Make sure the overlay is visible by checking it is selected in the right hand side bar
  2. Are all the grains to be counted selected in the left side bar of the grain list?
  3. Has a Region of Interest been set for each grain?
  4. Make sure the grains to be counted have not been locked in the left hand side bar. If they have then unlock them by clicking on the small padlock symbol, or clicking the same symbol at the top of the list to unlock all grains.
  5. Have the Analysis Settings values been set correctly? Most importantly, check that the minimum and maximum track areas have been set, and that they have realistic values. If in doubt try the default settings of 0.1 and 4.0 µm2, respectively which should set satisfactorily broad limits in most cases.
  6. Make sure the scale calibrations are correctly set for the objective used at image capture. This is normally correct and set at the time of capture, but if they have been wrongly set they could affect the tracks size parameters needed for automatic counting. If in doubt select the default settings.
  7. Make sure that the correct images (nearly always the FFT are best) have been selected for the automatic counting

A quick way to check the best values for the minimum and maximum track areas in the Analysis Settings window is to do a trial count on a one or two individual grains using ‘count this grain’ in the pop-up menu that appears when you right-click over that particular grain in the grain list. Once you have succeeded in identifying some tracks you can hover the cursor over each track in the overlay to see its area displayed when the Count Review tool is selected in the Tool Bar. The area is displayed in both pixels and square microns, so you can see the typical sizes present and then adjust the preliminary area cut-off values in Analysis Settings to realistic limits for that sample. Once these have been adjusted to more reasonable values then run the automatic count on all the grains in the sample.