Development of Image Process for Crack Identification on Porcelain Insulators

This study proposes a crack identification algorithm to analyze the surface condition of porcelain insulators and to efficiently visualize cracks. The proposed image processing algorithm for crack identification consists of two primary steps. In the first step, the brightness is eliminated by converting the image to the lab color space. Then, the background is removed by the K-means clustering method. After that, the optimum image treatment is applied using morphological image processing and median filtering to remove unnecessary noise, such as blobs. In the second step, the preprocessed image is converted to grayscale, and any cracks present in the image are identified. Next, the region properties, such as the number of pixels and the ratio of the major to the minor axis, are used to separate the cracks from the noise. Using this image processing algorithm, the precision of crack identification for all the sample images was approximately 80%, and the F1 score was approximately 70. Thus, this method can be helpful for efficient crack monitoring.