Edge Detection and Geometric Feature Extraction of A Burners Jet in FNBZ Images Using Seeded Region Growing Algorithm

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Edge Detection and Geometric Feature Extraction of A Burners Jet in FNBZ Images Using Seeded Region Growing Algorithm
Hui-yong Li*, Zhen Zhou, Dong-lin Chen
School of Energy and Thermal Power Engineering, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha, 410076, China (E-mail: mimiyjiu@163.com) Abstract: The method based jet trajectory is routinely used in a cold-state test of FNBZ (flow field near burner zone). However, the traditional measurement can not effectively obtain useful information from the jet images. In this paper, the approach of computer-aided diagnosis based image processing is attempted. The noisy nature of the images, as well as varying intensity, edge feature and centerline location of the jet under different boiler loads, defeat most automatic detection algorithms, making computer-aided diagnosis difficult. This paper applies the seeded region growing algorithm to jet images with manualed seed selection and realizes semi-automated detection of edge feature and centerline location of the jet in the FNBZ images, producing good performance in tests. With the high success rate of over 90%, refinement of the scheme could be applicable in cold-state tests of FNBZ as a tool in aiding diagnosis, with possible applications in analysis of flame images for combusting condition. Keywords: Flow field, Image processing, Burner, Image segmentation, Feature extraction, Seeded Region Growing descriptions are based, and there are many different ways in which one can attempt to extract these parts from the image. Selection of an appropriate segmentation technique depends on the type of images and applications. There are primarily four types of segmentation techniques: thresholding, boundary-based, region-based, and hybrid techniques. Thresholding is based on the assumption that clusters in the histogram correspond to either background or objects of interest that can be extracted by separating these histogram clusters[26]. Boundary-based methods assume that the pixel properties, such as intensity, color, and texture, should change abruptly between different regions [711]. Region-based methods assume that neighboring pixels within the same region should have similar values (e.g. intensity, color, texture)[1214]. Hybrid methods tend to combine boundary detection and region growing together to achieve better segmentation[1524]. Seeded region growing (SRG) is one of the hybrid methods proposed by Adams and Bischof [22]. It starts with assigned seeds, and grow regions by merging a pixel into its nearest neighboring seed region. Mehnert and Jackway [23] pointed out that SRG has two inherent pixel order dependencies that cause different resulting segments. The first-order dependency occurs whenever several pixels have the same difference measure to their neighboring regions. The second-order dependency occurs when one pixel has the same difference measure to several regions. They used parallel processing and re-examination to eliminate the order dependencies. Fan et al. [24] presented an automatic color image segmentation algorithm by integrating coloredge extraction and seeded region growing on the YUV color space. Edges in Y, U, and V are detected by an isotropic edge detector, and the three components are combined to obtain edges. The centroids between adjacent edge regions are taken as the initial seeds. The disadvantage is that their seeds are

1 INTRODUCTION
The method based jet trajectory is routinely used in a cold-state test of FNBZ (flow field near bunrer zone). However, traditional measurements can not effectively obtain useful information from the jet images. The principles of digital image processing have found applications in an amazing diversity of areas, such as astronomy, generics, remote sensing, video communications, and biomedicine. Thereby, computer-aided diagnosis based image processing is becoming a feasible approach to analyze characteristics of the FNBZ for PC boilers. In this paper, the approach based image processing is attempted. Edge information and geometric features of a burners jet are significantly important parameters, which could represent appropriatly flow-field characteristic. By this token, it is necessary to extract these parameters using tools for image analysis and processing. However, the noisy nature of the images, as well as varying intensity, edge feature and centerline location of the jet under different boiler loads, defeat most automatic detection algorithms, making computer-aided diagnosis difficult. This paper proposes a multi-stage segment-based scheme for semi-automated detection of edge feature and centerline location of the jet in the FNBZ images. Image segmentation is a process of pixel classification. An image is segmented into subsets by assigning individual pixels to classes. It is an important step towards pattern detection and recognition. Pal and Pal [1] provided a review on various segmentation techniques. It should be noted that there is no single standard approach to segmentation. Many different types of scene parts can serve as the segments on which

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International Conference on Power Engineering-2007, October 23-27, 2007, Hangzhou, China proportional to the incident image intensity. The variance of

over-generated. In this paper, a semi-automated scheme for the detection of edge and centerline location of the jet in FNBZ images is proposed. The main stages of the proposed scheme are show in the flowchart in Fig. 1, identifying the main tasks of each stage. The implementation details are described in the following sections: In Section 2, pre-processes original jet images. In Section 3, jet segmentation by region growing. In Section 4, edge detection and geometric feature extraction Conclusions are made in Section 5.

N I is also O , thus the standard deviation is

O . The

signal to noise ratio (neglecting the other noises) is

O. Even without incident photons, some electrons obtain enough energy to get captured. This is due to thermal effects and is called thermal noise or dark current. The amount of thermal noise is proportional to the temperature, T , and the
exposure time. N th is modeled as Gaussian. The read out process introduces its own uncertainties and can inject electrons into the count. Read out noise is a function of the read out process and is independent of the image and the exposure time. Like image noise, N ro is modeled as Poisson noise. From the above analysis, obviously, Gaussian noise, photon counting noise and some result from various processing, e.g., quantizaition and transmission should be mainly considered. 2.2 Denoising and enhancement Mathematic morphology is a set- and lattice-theoritic methodology for image analysis, which aims at quantitatively describing the geomitrical structure of image objects. It was initiated [27, 29] in the late 1960s to analyze binary images from geological and biomedical data as well as to formalize and extend earlier or parallel work [32, 28] on binary pattern recongnition based on cellular automata and Boolean/threshold logic. In the late 1970s it was extended to gray-level images [29]. In the mid 1980s it was brought to the mainstram of image/signal processing and related to other monlinear filtering approaches [25, 26].Finally, in the late 1980s it was generalized to arbitrary lattices [30, 31]. The above evolution of morphologic image processing, which is a broad and coherent collection of theoretical concepts, nonlinear filters, design methodologies, and applications systems. Its rich theoretical framework, algorithmic efficency, easy implementability on special hardware, and suitability for many shape-oriented problems have propelled its widespread usuage and further advancement by mang academic and industry groups working on various problems in image processing, computer vision, and pattern recognition. Morphological filtering is effective in cleaning the image from various type of noise, and remarkbly, it is a powerful nonlinear methodology that can successfully solve problems involving geometrical aspects of the image. As show in Fig. 2, it is an original jet image which is captured by a CCD camera. It is corrupted by noises. The Fig.3 is the image processed by a morphological filter. Comparing with the Fig. 2 , the edge of the jet is enhanced and the signal to noise ratio is higher.

O/ O

2 PRE-PROCESSING
As with most image processing algorithms, image preparation is vital for effective use of the algorithms in producing useful results. A multi-step pre-processing stage is used in this scheme, as described below. 2.1 Noise analysis In this paper, a CCD camera was used to capture the trajectory of a burners jet in low light levels. So it is necessary to analyze the various noise sources affecting CCD imagery.

Fig.1 Flowchart of the proposed region growing for edge detection and features extraction of the jet CCD arrays work on the photoelectric principle. Incident photons are absorbed, causing electrons to be elevated into a high energy state. These electrons are captured in a well. After some time, the electrons are counted by a read out device. The number of electrons counted, N, can be written as: suppression

N I  N th  N ro

(1 )

Where N I is the number of electrons due to the image,

N th the number due to thermal noise, and N ro the number

due to read out effects.

NI

is Poisson, with the expected value EN I

Edge Detection and Geometric Feature Extraction of A Burners Jet in FNBZ Images Using Seeded Region Growing Algorithm

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Fig.2 An original jet image

Fig.3 Noise cleaning

Fig.5 Regions segmentation of the jet

3 JET SEGMENTATION
In this section, the jet will be sepreated from the background by the algotithm of region growing. 3.1 Overview of the region growing algorithm Fig. 4 presents the overview of the algorithm. Firstly, the color image is transformed from RGB to YCbCr color space. Secondly, we apply automatic seed selection to obtain initial seeds. Thirdly, the seeded region growing algorithm is used to segment the image into regions, where each region corresponds to one seed. Fourthly, the region-merging algorithm is applied to merge similar regions, and small regions are merged into their nearest neighboring regions[25, 26, 28]. Give the seed of the region to extract for seeded region growing

3.3 Results As a case, the result of the jet segmentation is illustrated in Fig.5, There are two yellow contours in the image, the inside one is the edge of core region of the jet. For all the pixels insede the core region, there is a tolerence which can be used to control the location definition of the jet.

4 EDGE DETECTION AND FEATURES EXTRACTION OF THE JET

Edge detection is an important tool in image analysis. An edge detection algorithm should show the locations of major edges in the image while ignoring false edges caused by noise.In this paper, edge of the jet need to be recognized by the result of region segmentation. The result of edge detection is illustrated in Fig. 6. Based a linear simulation algorithm, the angle between the two edges along the ejecting direction of the jet can be calculated. Because there exists a same distance from a point in the centerline to two edge-lines of the jet, the geometric centerline of the jet can be located. The final result is illustrated in Fig.7.

Apply the seeded region growing algorithm to segment the jet image

Apply the region-merging algorithm to overcome oversegmentation

Display the result of segmentation by region growing Fig. 4 Outline of the proposed algorithm 3.2 The method for automatic seed selection For automatic seed selection, the following three criteria must be satisfied. First, the seed pixel must have high similarity to its neighbors. Second, for an expected region, at least one seed must be generated in order to produce this region. Third, seeds for different regions must be disconnected.

Fig. 6 The result of edge extraction

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International Conference on Power Engineering-2007, October 23-27, 2007, Hangzhou, China class uncertainty and region homogeneity, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 23 (7) (2001) 689706. J. Basak, B. Chanda, On edge and line linking with connectionist model, IEEE Transactions on System, Man, and Cybernetics 24 (3) (1994) 413428. A. Marteli, An application of heuristic search methods to edge and contour detection, Graphics and Image Processing 19 (2) (1976) 73-83. V.S. Nalwa, E. Pauchon, Edgel aggregation and edge description, Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image Processing 40 (1) (1987) 7994. F.Y. Shih, S. Cheng, Adaptive mathematical morphology for edge linking, Information Sciences 167 (14) (2004) 921. R.C. Gonzalez, R.E. Woods, Digital Image Processing, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 2002. A. Tremeau, N. Bolel, A region growing and merging algorithm to color segmentation, Pattern Recognition 30 (7) (1997) 11911203. S.A. Hojjatoleslami, J. Kittler, Region growing: a new approach, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 7 (7) (1998) 10791084. N. Ikonomakis, K.N. Plataniotis, M. Zervakis, A.N. Venetsanopoulos, Region growing and region merging image segmentation, Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Digital Signal Processing 1 (1997) 299302. T. Pavlidis, Y.T. Liow, Integrating region growing and edge detection, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 12 (3) (1990) 225233. J.F. Haddon, J.F. Boyce, Image segmentation by unifying region and boundary information, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 12 (10) (1990) 929948. C. Chu, J.K. Aggarwal, The integration of image segmentation maps using region and edge information, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 15 (2) (1993) 12411252. Y. Deng, B.S. Manjunath, Unsupervised segmentation of colortexture regions in images and video, IEEE Transactions of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 23 (8) (2001) 800810. L. Vincent, P. Soille, Watershed in digital spaces: an efficient algorithm based on immersion simulations, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 13 (6) (1991) 583598. P. Salembier, Morphological multiscale segmentation for image coding, Signal Processing 38 (3) (1994) 359386. L. Najman, M. Schmitt, Geodesic saliency of watershed contours and hierarchical segmentation, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 18 (12) (1996) 11631173. R. Adams, L. Bischof, Seeded region growing, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine

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Fig. 7 The final result of features extraction

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5 CONCLUSION
As shown in Fig. 7, the location of geometric centerline and the angle between centerline and an edge of jet have been extracted. We can draw another conclusion: the value of angle between the two edges of the jest is 2h 4234 16degree; the value of angle between the geometric centerline and waterwall is 32 degree.

[13]

[14]

This paper makes an successful attempt extracting geometric features of a burners jet from some jet images. The principle nealy can be used to process any jet images with the high success rate of over 90% except for some images existing a lower intensity difference with background. Rrefinement of the scheme could be
applicable in the cold-state test of FNBZ as a tool in aiding diagnosis, with possible applications in analysis of flame images for combusting condition.

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