Image Analysis in the Study of Dissipative Spatial Patterns

The rapidly growing science of image analysis (IA) by artificial intelligence methods has been applied to many diverse fields such as: biology, geology, earth scanning by satellites, photography, and a variety of military uses. In chemistry IA has been used mainly for rapid analysis of spectral output [1] in, for instance mass spectroscopy. Recently we have applied this powerful tool for the analysis of real spatial structures in chemistry. One example is in fractal surface analysis [2] and the other is in dissipative spatial patterns. In the latter case, the discovery of the general phenomenon of spatial structure formation by chemical reactions at liquid interfaces [3] has led to questions previously unasked by chemists, for instance, `How to measure the kinetic growth of a product not distributed evenly in space ?'; `What is the change in entropy as a pattern develops ?'; `How to qualitatively differentiate one pattern from another ?'.