Phase extraction and boundary removal in dual phase steel micrographs

In order to study the material characteristics, it is essential to obtain the quantitative description of micro-structure of the materials. In this context, digital image processing is used to analyze the microscopic images of the materials. Extraction of grains/phases present in the material is the fundamental step to achieve the description of the micro-structure. In this work, we present an automated scheme for segmenting the phases present in the microscopic image of high strength low alloy steel. The challenge posed by the presence of revealed grain boundaries bearing striking similarity with one of the phases also has been addressed successfully. Experiment shows that proposed scheme has the inherent capability to cope up with the factors like magnification, imaging condition affecting the image characteristics.