Fractal Dimension as Robust Estimate of Low Carbon Steels Hardness

Application of computational methods in engineering and science constantly increases, which is also visible in sector of material science, often with promising results. In following paper, authors would like to propose fractal dimension, a mathematical method of quantifying self-similarity and complexity of spatial patterns, as robust method of hardness estimation of low carbon steels. A dataset of microstructure images and corresponding Vickers hardness measurements of S235JR steel under different delivery conditions was created. Then, three different computational methods for evaluation of materials hardness based on microstructure image were tested. In this paper those methods are called: (i) Otsu-based index, (ii) fractal dimension index and (iii) vision transformer index. The results were compared with method used in literature for similar problems. Comparison showed that fractal dimension performs better than other evaluated methods, in terms of median absolute error, which value was equal to 4.12 HV1, which is significantly lower than results achieved by Otsu-based index and vision transformer index, which were 4.49 HV1 and 5.07 HV1 respectively. Those results can be attributed to the relative robustness of fractal dimension index, when compared to other methods. Robust estimation is preferable, due to the high amount of noise in the dataset, which is a consequence of the nature of used material.