Measurement of Bitumen Coverage of Stones for Road Building, Based on Digital Image Analysis

• The top layer of a road is made up of a mixture of stones and bitumen and the durability is dependent on how well the bitumen adheres to the stones. The standard way of determining the bitumen coverage in the industry is the so called rolling bottle method, where a number of stones cov- ered with bitumen are put in a rolling bottle and the bitu- men coverage is estimated after different times. This paper describes a novel method for measuring the bitumen cover- age of the stones by using advanced segmentation methods instead of manual inspection. The stones are put on a ta- ble and a number of images with different exposure times are taken. The images are normalized and the stones are segmented from the background based on a threshold ob- tained from an optimality criterion. Then the bitumen cov- ered parts of the stones are segmented based on a graph-cut method. The results are compared to manual inspection and are well in agreement with these.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Matematik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Mathematics (hsv//eng)

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