Conceptualization of seeded region growing by pixels aggregation. Part 4: Simple, generic and robust extraction of grains in granular materials obtained by X-ray tomography

Abstract: This paper proposes a simple, generic and robust method to extract the grains from experimental tridimensionnal images of granular materials obtained by X-ray tomography. This extraction has two steps: segmentation and splitting. For the segmentation step, if there is a sufficient contrast between the different components, a classical threshold procedure followed by a succession of morphological filters can be applied. If not, and if the boundary needs to be localized precisely, a watershed transformation controlled by labels is applied. The basement of this transformation is to localize a label included in the component and another label in the component complementary. A "soft" threshold following by an opening is applied on the initial image to localize a label in a component. For any segmentation procedure, the visualisation shows a problem: some groups of two grains, close one to each other, become connected. So if a classical cluster procedure is applied on the segmented binary image, these numerical connected grains are considered as a single grain. To overcome this problem, we applied a procedure introduced by L. Vincent in 1993. This grains extraction is tested for various complexes porous media and granular material, to predict various properties (diffusion, electrical conductivity, deformation field) in a good agreement with experiment data.