Segmentation of Natural Fine Aggregates in Micro-CT Microstructures of Recycled Aggregates Using Unet-VGG16

Segmentation of material phases through image analysis is essential for analyzing the microstructure of materials. Micro-CT images exhibit variations in grayscale values depending on the phases constituting the material. Phase segmentation is generally achieved by comparing the grayscale values in the images. In the case of waste concrete used as a recycled aggregate, it is challenging to distinguish between hydrated cement paste and natural aggregates, as these components exhibit similar grayscale values in micro-CT images. In this study, we propose a method for automatically separating the aggregates in concrete, in micro-CT images. Utilizing the Unet-VGG16 deep-learning network, we introduce a technique for segmenting the 2D aggregate images and stacking them to obtain 3D aggregate images. Image filtering is employed to separate aggregate particles from the selected 3D aggregate images. The performance of aggregate segmentation is validated through accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score assessments.