Image analysis and mathematical morphology for civil engineering materials

The scope of this paper is to present the main tools of image analysis to investigate materials and, specially, civil engineering ones. First the acquisition methods are described. The different operators for filtering, segmentation and binary image processing are presented and illustrated on different images. The influence of the observation field on these operators and the bias correction is also introduced. Then the problem of the parametrical characterization is presented: stereological parameters and functions related to size distributions, dispersion and anisotropy. Finally, the model methods based on image analysis are recalled. Some annexes illustrate this paper to precise main basic notions to understand the morphological tools. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.