Level set and geodesic active contours based measurement of material removal between serial sections

The measurement of the thickness of material removed between serial sections is a crucial step of three-dimension reconstruction. Geodesic active contours is an efficient method for contour detection of objects on an image. The indents on the SiC/Al composite micrographs are segmented by using level set and geodesic active contours. After getting the contours of the indents, we calculate the distance from the uppermost pixel to the lowermost pixel to get the vertical diagonal length, and calculate the distance from the leftmost pixel to the rightmost pixel to get the horizontal diagonal length of each contour. Then the final length of each diagonal is acquired by averaging the vertical diagonal length and the horizontal diagonal length, respectively. The Vickers’ indenter is made by a square pyramidal-shaped diamond with opposite faces at an angle of 136°, so the thickness of material removed between two serial sections and the length difference of the diagonals on the two serial sections has a definite geometrical relation. Thus the thickness of material removed between two serial sections is acquired using the geometrical relation.