Abstract
The contacts are critical in granular soils because they control force transmission and therefore the loadbearing capacity of granular soils. In the last decade, the advances of X-ray Computed Tomography (X-ray CT) techniques enabled researchers to capture three-dimensional (3D) volumetric images of soils, in which contacts can be observed. Many researchers have used a 3D image processing technique, called watershed analysis, to identify contacts in 3D volumetric images of soils. However, the watershed analysis cannot discriminate contacting particles and peanut-shaped particles, resulting in oversegmentation of peanut-shaped particles. This research developed an improved watershed analysis to solve this issue. The proposed algorithm was validated using a crushed limestone specimen, which contains many elongated and peanut-shaped particles. The results showed that the improve watershed analysis can accurately identify all the contacts in this challenging soil specimen.
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Sun, Q., Zheng, J. (2020). Identification of Contacts in Volumetric Images of Granular Soils. In: Correia, A., Tinoco, J., Cortez, P., Lamas, L. (eds) Information Technology in Geo-Engineering. ICITG 2019. Springer Series in Geomechanics and Geoengineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32029-4_37
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32029-4_37
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