Surface Detection of Continuous Casting Slabs Based on Curvelet Transform and Kernel Locality Preserving Projections Original Research Article

Longitudinal cracks are common defects of continuous casting slabs and may lead to serious quality accidents. Image capturing and recognition of hot slabs is an effective way for on-line detection of cracks, and recognition of cracks is essential because the surface of hot slabs is very complicated. In order to detect the surface longitudinal cracks of the slabs, a new feature extraction method based on Curvelet transform and kernel locality preserving projections (KLPP) is proposed. First, sample images are decomposed into three levels by Curvelet transform. Second, Fourier transform is applied to all sub-band images and the Fourier amplitude spectrum of each sub-band is computed to get features with translational invariance. Third, five kinds of statistical features of the Fourier amplitude spectrum are computed and combined in different forms. Then, KLPP is employed for dimensionality reduction of the obtained 62 types of high-dimensional combined features. Finally, a support vector machine (SVM) is used for sample set classification. Experiments with samples from a real production line of continuous casting slabs show that the algorithm is effective to detect longitudinal cracks, and the classification rate is 91.89%.