Automatic Evaluation of Nickel Alloy Secondary Phases from SEM Images

• Author(s): Victor Hugo C. de Albuquerque ; Cleiton Carvalho Silva ; Thiago Ivo de S. Menezes ; Jesualdo Pereira Farias ; João Manuel R. S. Tavares
• Date: 2011
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10216/26925
• Origin: Repositório Aberto da Universidade do Porto
• Subject(s): Ciências Físicas; Ciência de computadores; Design de sistemas; Redes neuronais
• Document Type: Article
• Language: English

Description

Quantitative metallography is a technique to determine and correlate the microstructures of materials with their properties and behavior. Generic commercial image processing and analysis software packages have been used to quantify material phases from metallographic images. However, these all-purpose solutions also have some drawbacks, particularly when applied to segmentation of material phases. To overcome such limitations, this work presents a new solution to automatically segment and quantify material phases from SEM metallographic images. The solution is based on a neuronal network and in this work was used to identify the secondary phase precipitated in the gamma matrix of a Nickel base alloy. The results obtained by the new solution were validated by visual inspection and compared with the ones obtained by a commonly used commercial software. The conclusion is that the new solution is precise, reliable and more accurate and faster than the commercial software.