Automated Quality Assessment of Remelted Steel Ingots

For high quality steel products it is essential to have specific understanding of the underlying steel production process such as the electric slag remelting process (ESR). To assist the currently manual assessment there is a high need for objective quality measures and standardized evaluation methods. A set of relevant parameters can be derived from the so-called pool profiles that give insight to the remelting process. Based on texture segmentation and ridge detection a computer-vision based automated evaluation of the pool profiles is achieved. A comparison with manually extracted pool profiles from expert metallurgists shows the feasibility of the approach and the good performance of the automated analysis. Further evaluation on different types of steel blocks will yield valuable insight to and improve the overall steel production process.