A novel Vickers hardness measurement technique based on Adaptive Balloon Active Contour Method

• New methodology to measure Vickers hardness.
• Application Balloon Adaptive Active Contours Method.
• Comparison with results obtained from traditional methods and specialists.
• Proposed method present results better than conventional measures.

Among the forms of assessment of materials to use in a particular application there is the measuring systems of Vickers hardness. This measurement is performed manually by experts, being very interpretative and subjective, which usually leads to variability of the Vickers hardness value between observers and even for the same observer. The experience of the skilled in measurement will determine if the material can be used for an application or not. There are some works use traditional methods to perform the measurement of Vickers hardness for Digital Image Processing (DIP). This work’s main objective has been to propose a new methodology capable of determining the Vickers Hardness testing values from indentation images by using the Adaptive Balloon Active Contour Methods. The results of the hardness measurement using the Adaptive Balloon Active Contour Method (ABACM) were significant compared to other methods, by observing the MSE obtained from the measured Vickers hardness, the value by obtained ABACM method is three times lower than the Region Growing method, and five times lower than Watershed method. In addition, the measurement method was carried out in 1.2 ± 0.3 s. The proposed method stands out for not requiring pre-processing and post-processing steps, because its mathematical formulation is robust to noise in this application. It is worth highlighting que Significantly cam close to the two specialists, Demonstrating que can be used to aid in measuring the Vickers hardness.