Granulometry
The analysis of granulometry of substances is relevant in a great variety of the research and industrial applications as such as the pharmaceutical sector, the food sector, the basic materials production and in the concrete and wood panel industries. This analysis is important since many relevant properties of the materials can depend on the distribution of the particles sizes/shapes during the production.
An innovative method capable to estimate the particles size distribution in an image without the use of segmentation techniques by using neural networks have been studiedied. The implemented method presents a set of techniques based on the wavelet analysis and image processing algorithms suitable to extract relevant features for the granulometry analysis. Then, the extracted set of features is used as input to neural networks to achieve the classification of each single pixel accordingly to the probability of belonging to a specific class of particles size (a single band in the histogram of the distribution of the particles size). The produced outputs have been used to perform the estimation of the particle granulometry contained in the image. Results are encouraging and show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
A virtual environment to create and test an image-based granulometric system based on the 3D engine Blender has also been implemented.
Schema of the wood classification approach
References
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R. Donida Labati, A. Genovese,
E. Muñoz, V. Piuri, F. Scotti, "3-D granulometry using image processing", in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, pp. 1251-1264, March, 2019. ISSN: 1551-3203. [DOI: 10.1109/TII.2018.2856466][PDF]
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S. Ferrari, V. Piuri, F. Scotti, "Virtual environment for granulometry analysis", in Proc. of the 2008 IEEE Conf. on Virtual Environments, Human-Computer Interfaces and Measurement Systems (VECIMS 2008), Istanbul, Turkey, pp. 156-161, July 14-16, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-4244-1927-2. [DOI: 10.1109/VECIMS.2008.4592772][PDF]
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S. Ferrari, V. Piuri, F. Scotti, "Image processing for granulometry analysis via neural networks", in Proc. of the 2008 IEEE Int. Conf. on Computational Intelligence for Measurement Systems and Applications (CIMSA 2008), Istanbul, Turkey, pp. 28-32, July 14-16, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-4244-2305-7. [DOI: 10.1109/CIMSA.2008.4595827][PDF]