Visualization and Quantification of Broken Wires in Steel Wire Ropes Based on Induction Thermography

Wire ropes (WRs) are widely used in various areas, such as tourist cables, mining, and elevators. Thus, it is very important to detect broken wires (BWs) to prevent safety issues. To guarantee the structural health of WRs, this paper proposes the use of induction thermography (IT) to detect the BWs. An image segmentation algorithm based on scale morphology is proposed to eliminate the background influence of non-uniform heating and visualize the BWs. Further, the area of the BW region, after the image binarization, subtraction, and filtering, is extracted as a feature to quantify the number of BWs. Results show that the proposed methods can effectively visualize and quantify the broken region within 1 BWs.