Determination of Brinell Hardness of Metals through Image Processing

Hardness is the property of a material to resist indentation and scratching. Hardness is measured on special hardness testing machines by measuring the resistance of the material against penetration of an indenter of special shape and material under a given load. Brinell hardness test is a commonly used method to measure the hardness of metal. The present method of hardness measurement invokes lot of manual operations for measuring the diameter of indentation and in finalising the hardness value which requires a lot of consciousness from the workers side. In this manual measurement process, we can't assure a versatile output. And also for worker-to-worker, the way of measurement that is their working style will be different which leads to different outputs. To overcome the tedious manual measurement process, we propose digital image processing to find the indentation diameter to compute the corresponding hardness of material without manual intervention.