Quantification of the thickness of Widmanstatten α-laths in Ti alloys

It is important to accurately measure the micro structural feature parameters of titanium alloys. In this paper, a new method to measure the thickness of the Widmanstatten α-laths is proposed. In the present main methods, an assumption is shared that all laths are parallel. In our new method, the assumption is thrown off. Hence, our method is more reasonable, accurate and less restrictive in application. In the method, firstly, the partition Otsu binarization is used to preprocessing the metallographic image, which improves the image quality. Secondly, based on the preprocessed image, all α-laths of closed edge are searched out. Thirdly, primary line segment in the boundary of each lath is found. Finally, the thickness of each lath is counted by taking the primary line as baseline. Experiment shows that the method is effective and reasonable.