Mineral filler content measurement of asphalt mixture based on image processing

The mineral filler with proper content is critical to the performance of the asphalt mixture and the measurement of the mineral filler content is important in the asphalt pavement construction. The testing measurement methods of mineral filler are time-consuming and operational-complex. This paper presents an image processing based method to measure the mineral filler content in the asphalt mixture. The image processing based method first establishes a color table which involves such fields as the asphalt type, filler type, filler content and the normalized histogram of the asphalt mortar mixed by known filler bitumen ratio. Then, the method carries on slice transformation to the asphalt mixture image to segments the asphalt mortar parts in the image. At last, through the normalized histogram correlation method, the mineral filler content could be measured accurately. The image processing based method is simple, effective and worth trying in practice. ©2011 ISSN 1881-803X.