Differentiation between Recycling Refractory Bricks by Texture Analysis

Refractory products based on dolomite are used almost exclusively in steel production. Recycling of these materials after removal from service could have a strong economic impact. Recycling is driven also by legislation or corporate efforts to reduce or eliminate industrial waste. Typically, a large steel industry, should recycle 1000 tons refractory bricks every month. Nowadays this operation is executed by human operators that select manually the bricks with a 90% reliability. In this work we identify and evaluate the meaningful texture features that allow automatic classification of different kinds of refractory bricks. Several indexes have been evaluated and they show that they can be able and effective to give suitable solutions for this problem.