Automatic Measurement of Concrete Crack Width in 2D Multiple-phase Images for Building Safety Evaluation

Abstract

Most of image processing techniques, that are developed for measuring concrete crack width in building safety evaluation process, have focused on two-phase piecewise constant images. However, the crack images in real applications are usually 2D multiple-phase piecewise constant images, which are defined as having more than 2 piecewise constant intensity phases. In this paper, we proposed a novel technique for automatically measuring crack widths in 2D multiple-phase images, which includes three main steps. Firstly, we used crack enhancement filter to enhance crack and remove other unintended objects in the intensity inhomogeneous image. Secondly, we utilized a B-spline level set model to automatically extract crack locations. Finally, we proposed to use a Savitzky-Golay filter based method to measure crack widths along the whole detected cracks. Several experiments are demonstrated to show the superior of our method in measuring crack width from images of real scene of damaged building.