Evaluation of Surface Crack Development on Marine Concrete Structure Using Matlab Image Processing

Abstract

The sustainability of reinforced concrete is critical, particularly for structures exposed to marine environments. Chlorides are implicated in causing or accelerating reinforcement corrosion and potentially earlier expensive repairs. Besides, there is no account of carelessness and the proper control of the degradation of the concrete. Therefore, image binarization, which is widely employed for text recognition and medical image processing, is very suitable to be used for crack detection. Nevertheless, crack detection utilizing the Otsu method as the standard image binarization approach is unsatisfying because image binarization depends on the image quality, characteristics of the background surface, and associated parameters. Moreover, crack detection also suffers from challenges such as low contrast, uneven illumination, noise pollution, and the existence of shading, blemishes, or concrete spalling in images. Thus, better methods for image binarizing-based crack detection are constantly researched in the academic community. The purpose of this research paper is to analyze the crack formation on the surface of a marine concrete structure at a jetty and to evaluate the surface crack formation on marine concrete structures using MATLAB image processing. The image algorithm is proposed and executed in MATLAB. The image is processed to enhance the image quality image and later analyzed based on crack properties focused on the length of the crack. The evaluation of surface concrete crack length analysis at the jetty was successfully processed with a proposed algorithm for all 8 critical points. These data can be used to characterize damage and estimate repair costs.