An image processing approach to determination of steel fibers orientation in reinforced concrete

Abstract

The paper presents a preliminary study aimed to automatically determine the position and orientation of steel fibers in fiber-reinforced concrete. This is required for assessment of the relation between the methods of forming and resulting concentration, position and orientation of steel fibers. Concrete beams with various types of fibers and method of forming were scanned using Computed Tomography and the resulting volumetric images were subjected to image segmentation. From the obtained label map the position and orientation in 3D of each steel fiber were calculated. This enabled generating 4D histograms visualizing in compact form the overall orientation of the fibers. Statistical analysis showed that the orientation of the fibers exhibit exponential distribution. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.