The synthetic microstructure generator is a script written in Matlab code and developed by Mark Tschoop. At this moment, the last updated version is  November 2009. By means of this tool we can generate a binary image with non-overlapping ellipses of varying sizes and distributions. It was originally developed to examine the influence of particle aspect ratio, area fraction, and orientation on representative length scales in two-phase microstructures. This tool also includes the ability to generate particles with various distributions of particle sizes and orientations (Tschopp, Wilks, Spowart, “Multi-Scale Characterization of Orthotropic Microstructures,” MSMSE, vol. 16, nº 6, (2008) ).

Some interesting questions to be pointed  about this software are:

• Wide range of possibilities in order to generate perfectly segmented microstructures. This means that we can bypass the sample presentation and image acquisition in order to research on composite materials directly on the image processing and statistical analysis
• Nice proposals for improvement, as the code is opened and it can be modified to generate new synthetic microstructures, let’s say: (i) an overlapped version, (ii) the possibility of entering a BW template different than an ellipse (particle morphology in addition to aspect ratio), (iii) particle size distribution and particle clustering (spatial distribution), to name a few.
• Once the improvements have been tested and published in Matlab Central, it would be nice to implement the Java plug-in version for ImageJ

Finally, we consider that this software is high-quality as it has been hardly tested.