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Automatic identification of metallurgical phases based on thresholding methods in microstructural images may not be possible when the pixel intensities associated with the metallurgical phases overlap and, hence, are indistinguishable. To circumvent this problem, additional visual information about the metallurgical phases, referred to as textural features, are considered in this study. Mathematically, textural features are the second order statistics of an image domain and can be distinct for each metallurgical phase. Textural features are evaluated from the gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) of each metallurgical phase (ferrite, pearlite, and martensite) present in heat-treated ASTM A36 steels in this study. The dataset of textural features and pixel intensities generated for the metallurgical phases is used to train supervised machine learning classifiers, which are subsequently employed to predict the metallurgical phases in the microstructure. Naïve Bayes (NB), k-nearest neighbor (K-NN), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), and decision tree (DT) classifiers are the four classifiers employed in this study. The performances of all four classifiers were assessed prior to their deployment, and the classification accuracy was found to be >97%. The proposed technique has two unique advantages: (1) unlike pixel intensity-based methods, the proposed method does not misclassify the grain boundaries as a metallurgical phase, and (2) the proposed method does not require the end-user to input the number of phases present in the microstructure.

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Fugitive dust is a serious threat to unpaved road users from a safety and health point of view. Dust suppressing materials or dust suppressants are often employed to lower the fugitive dust. Currently, many dust suppressants are commercially available and are being developed for various applications. The performance of these dust suppressants depends on their physical and chemical properties, application frequency and rates, soil type, wind speed, atmospheric conditions, etc. This article presents a comprehensive review of various available and in-development dust suppression materials and their dust suppression mechanisms. Specifically, the dust suppressants that lower the fugitive dust either through hygroscopicity (ability to absorb atmospheric moisture) and/or agglomeration (ability to cement the dust particles) are reviewed. The literature findings, recommendations, and limitations pertaining to dust suppression on unpaved roads are discussed at the end of the review.

The similarity in the hue of corroded surfaces and coated surfaces, dust, vegetation, etc. leads to visual ambiguity which is challenging to eliminate using existing image classification/segmentation techniques. Furthermore, existing methods lack the ability to identify the source of corrosion, which plays a vital role in framing the corrosion mitigation strategies. The goal of this study to employ hyperspectral imaging (1) to detect corroded surfaces under visually ambiguous scenarios and (2) identify the source of corrosion in such scenarios. To this end, three different corrosive media, namely, (1) 1M hydrochloric acid (HCl), 2) 3.5 wt.% sodium chloride solution (NaCl), and (3) 3 wt.% sodium sulfate solution (Na2SO4), are employed to generate chemically distinctive corroded surfaces. The hyperspectral imaging sensor is employed to obtain the visible and near infrared (VNIR) spectra (397 nm–1004 nm) reflected by the corroded/coated surfaces. The intensity of the reflectance in various spectral bands are considered as the descriptive features in this study, and the training and test datasets were generated consisting of 35,000 and 15,000 data points, respectively. SVM classifier is trained and then its efficacy on the test data is assessed. Furthermore, validation datasets are employed and the generalization ability of the trained SVM classifier is verified. The results from this study revealed that the SVM classifier achieved an overall accuracy of 94% with the misclassifications of 18% and 13% in the case of NaCl and Na2SO4 corrosion, respectively. Reflectance spectra obtained in the VNIR region was found to eliminate the visual ambiguity between the corroded and coated surfaces and, identify the source of corrosion accurately. Further, the range of key wavelengths of the spectra that play an important role in the distinguishability of coating and chemically distinctive corroded surface were identified to be 500–520 nm, 660–680 nm, 760–770 nm, and 830–850 nm.

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