Continuously improving imaging technologies allow to capture the complex spatial
geometry of particles. Consequently, methods to characterize their three
dimensional shapes must become more sophisticated, too. Our contribution to
the geometric analysis of particles based on 3d image data is to unambiguously
generalize size and shape descriptors used in 2d particle analysis to the spatial
setting.
While being defined and meaningful for arbitrary particles, the characteristics
were actually selected motivated by the application to technical cleanliness. Residual
dirt particles can seriously harm mechanical components in vehicles, machines,
or medical instruments. 3d geometric characterization based on micro-computed
tomography allows to detect dangerous particles reliably and with
high throughput. It thus enables intervention within the production line. Analogously
to the commonly agreed standards for the two dimensional case, we
show how to classify 3d particles as granules, chips and fibers on the basis of
the chosen characteristics. The application to 3d image data of dirt particles is
demonstrated.
We compute three-dimensional displacement vector fields to estimate the deformation of microstructural data sets in mechanical tests. For this, we extend the well-known optical flow by Brox et al. to three dimensions, with special focus on the discretization of nonlinear terms. We evaluate our method first by synthetically deforming foams and comparing against this ground truth and second with data sets of samples that underwent real mechanical tests. Our results are compared to those from state-of-the-art algorithms in materials science and medical image registration. By a thorough evaluation, we show that our proposed method is able to resolve the displacement best among all chosen comparison methods.