Rock fracture skeleton tracing by image processing and quantitative analysis by geometry features

Abstract

In rock engineering, fracture measurement is important for many applications. This paper proposes a novel method for rock fracture skeleton tracing and analyzing. As for skeleton localizing, the curvilinear fractures are multiscale enhanced based on a Hessian matrix, after image binarization, and clutters are post-processed by image analysis; subsequently, the fracture skeleton is extracted via ridge detection combined with a distance transform and thinning algorithm, after which gap sewing and burrs removal repair the skeleton. In regard to skeleton analyzing, the roughness and distribution of a fracture network are respectively described by the fractal dimensions Ds and Db; the intersection and fragmentation of a fracture network are respectively characterized by the average number of ends and junctions per fracture Naverage and the average length per fracture Laverage. Three rock fracture surfaces are analyzed for experiments and the results verify that both the fracture tracing accuracy and the analysis feasibility are satisfactory using the new method.