Identification of liquid crystalline phases in 7O.O9 compound based on structural similarity index measure

Textural analysis is done in the case of the thermotropic liquid crystal (LC), 4-heptyloxybenzylidene-4′-nonyloxyaniline, 7O.O9, using a polarising microscope attached with a hot stage with a high-resolution camera. Natural images are highly structured: their pixels exhibit strong dependencies and carry important information about the structure of the objects. In this article, we consider the structural similarity index measure parameter computed as a function of the temperature. The results exhibit abrupt changes with temperature showing different liquid crystalline phases. This statistical image analysis is compared with the differential scanning calorimeter data and good agreement was found. The proposed methodology is very sensitive and reliable technique to identify the LC phases.