The methodology consists of the following steps:

 Splitting of the fractograph into subparts

 Detection of void contours in each subpart
 Merging of the void contours from all subparts

A. Splitting of fractograph into subparts

The fractograps consists of voids and adjacent voids are separated by boundaries. Ideally voids
are darker and have low intensity whereas boundaries are of high intensity. But from the given
fractographs it can be observed that the fractographs consists of huge intensity variation due to
illumination effect. The corners of the fractographs have low illumination whereas center of the
fractographs poses high illumination. Thus to perform binarization by applying any intensity
based technique on the whole image may produce an erroneous threshold. To reduce the effect of
illumination variation in threshold selection, the fractograph is divided into K 2 sub images by
dividing the height and width of the fractograph by K parts. K is experimentally chosen as 3 in
our proposed technique.

B. Detection of void contours in each subpart

After dividing the fractograph into subparts the void contours are detected in each subpart
separately. For detecting the void contours in each subpart a two stage algorithm is applied. First
primary contours are detected and then some refinement is applied on the detected contours.

(i) Primary contour detection: To detect the primary contour from each subpart of the
fractograph, first each subpart is binarized using intensity based thresholding. Otsu [ ]
thresholding technique is applied to choose the threshold. The pixels with intensity values higher
than threshold are converted into black and the pixels with intensity values lower than threshold
are converted into white. Thus the voids become white and boundaries become black in the
binarized image. After that morphological closing [ ] operation is performed using 5X5
structuring element to remove the discontinuities in the detected boundaries. Next standard
thinning algorithm [ ] is applied to convert the boundaries into single pixel width and the primary
contour is detected using region growing [ ] algorithm.

(ii) Refinement of the detected contour: After the primary contour detection, it is observed that
some smaller voids are merged and detected as larger voids. These larger voids are identified and
same set of operations namely thresholding, closing, thinning and region growing are applied in
each large void separately based on local information.

C. Merging of the void contours from all subparts

After detecting the void contours in each K2 sub parts all these results are merged together to
produce the final void contour of the fractograph. To perform this merging operation first all
these outputs are combined into single image. But this image may have some discontinuities in
the void contours. Because the detected void contours in the border of a subpart may not be
merged with the detected void contours in the border of the next subpart. To remove these
discontinuities edge linking operation is applied for each open contour. First open end point in
each open contour is determined. A contour pixel with only one contour pixel in its 3X3
neighbour is considered as open end point. Gradient direction is computed for each of these open
end points using Sobel operator [ ] and are considered as edge property. To link an open end
point P, searching operation is carried out within its KXK neighbours to find another open end
point Q with similar edge property. If no such open end point is found, searching is continued by
increasing the value of K. In our experiment K is chosen as 4 initially and increased up to 7.
These two open end points P and Q are joined together to form a long continuous contour.