Abstract
This paper proposes a method that automatically extracts characteristics of cracks such as length, thickness and direction, etc., from a concrete surface image with image processing techniques. This paper, first, uses the closing morphologic operation to adjust the effect of light extending over the whole concrete surface image. After applying the high-pass filtering operation to sharpen boundaries of cracks, we classify intensity values of the image into 8 groups and remove intensity values belong to the highest frequency group among them for the removal of background. Then, we binarize the preprocessed image. The auxiliary lines used to measure cracks of concrete surface are removed from the binarized image with position information extracted by the histogram operation. Then, cracks broken by the removal of background are extended to reconstruct an original crack with the $5{\times}5$ masking operation. We remove unnecessary information by applying three types of noise removal operations successively and extracts areas of cracks from the binarized image. At last, the opening morphologic operation is applied to compensate extracted cracks and characteristics of cracks are measured on the compensated ones. Experiments using real images of concrete surface showed that the proposed method extracts cracks well and precisely measures characteristics of cracks.