An Automated Image Analysis Framework for Thermal Barrier Coating Porosity Measurement

Thermal barrier coating is a widely used advanced manufacturing technique. This paper introduces an image analysis based automated thermal barrier coating porosity measurement (TBCPM) framework. The proposed automated image analysis framework consists of two modules, including 1) top coat layer detection module, and 2) microstructure recognition and porosity measurement module. The first module is designed to automatically identify the top coat layer, a region of interest (ROI), in a thermal barrier coating image using a histogram-based approach. The second module recognizes the microstructures in the top coat layer using a local thresholding based image segmentation. The experimental results demonstrate that the porosity measurement produced from the proposed TBCPM framework is comparable to that of the domain experts.