Measurement of the degraded depth in cementitious materials by automatic digital image processing

The combination of a staining method and an automatic digital image-processing algorithm is presented here, to measure degradation depths in cementitious materials. The measurement of those degraded depths is usually made by direct visual measurements, resulting in many errors and low reproducibility. The automatic digital image analysis (ADIA) method proposed here is mainly based on the differentiation of the degraded zone and the sound zone on the basis of the image histogram. The method comprises several steps, such as sample alignment, image calibration, background subtraction, image filtering, automatic segmentation and final measurement of the degraded depth. The algorithm developed has been used to measure the degraded depths of a set of decalcified cement mortars, made from different cement types and with varying w/b ratios. Relative to previous methods, this automatic procedure improves the precision (about 0.03 mm) and the statistical representation of the measurements. The results obtained by ADIA were compared with direct visual measurements with a very good correlation (R-2 = 0.96) and a mean error of 6%.