Applications of Image Processing Technique in Porous Material Characterization

Nondestructive testing (NDT) provides safe operation to engineering components – it eliminates the risk of damage during operation, and does not require specific sample preparation. It has been widely used to detect and evaluate defects, or measure properties of different types of materials and engineering structures. Examples of NDT techniques include ultrasonic, radiography, infrared thermography, electromagnetic techniques and visible optical methods. The imaging principles and imaging facilities used by these techniques can be very different, but almost all the techniques listed above require image processing to some extent. In this chapter, instead of extensively exploring all the NDT techniques and corresponding image processing methods, we will focus on optical measurement technique and related image processing methods, and use porous materials as specimens.