Automatic Detection of Cast Billet Dendrite Based on Improved Hough Transform

Primary dendrite information is one of the most important metrics to measure the quality of continuous cast slabs. The contrast of low magnification images is very low under the influence of illumination and sampling devices, so the traditional dendrite detection method has the problem of missed detections. We propose an automatic dendrite detection method based on an improved Hough transform, which effectively improves the accuracy and efficiency of primary dendrite detection. By using the local grayscale features of the image, a genetic algorithm-based local contrast enhancement algorithm is proposed. Compared with the traditional contrast enhancement algorithm, it can retain all the information of the dendrites. Combined with the image binarization method based on Hessian matrix, we can obtain more detailed information about the dendrites. According to the continuity and solidification characteristics of dendrites, the Hough transform is improved to extract dendrite information, which effectively reduces the computational cost of the Hough transform. The experimental results show that the method of this paper has versatility, and the error is four pixels compared with the manual method, which can provide a reliable basis for the subsequent judgement of the quality of cast billets.