Laser-based scanning can provide a precise surface profile. It has been widely applied to the inspection of pipe inner walls and is often used along with other types of sensors, like sonar and close-circuit television (CCTV). These measurements can be used for pipe deterioration modeling and condition assessment. Geometric information needs to be extracted to characterize anomalies in the pipe profile. Since the laser scanning measures the distance, segmentation with a threshold is a straightforward way to isolate the anomalies. However, threshold with a fixed distance value does not work well for the laser range image due to the intensity inhomogeneity, which is caused the uncontrollable factors during the inspection. Thus, a local binary fitting (LBF) active contour model is employed in this work to process the laser range image and an image phase congruency algorithm is adopted to provide the initial contour as required by the LBF method. The combination of these two approaches can successfully detect the anomalies from a laser range image.
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