Analysis and tracking of destructive tests on working turbo fans involving image processing techniques

This paper discusses a number of methods derived from image processing for the tracking of destructive tests on turbofans. In order to obtain as much information as possible, these tests are filmed by high-speed cameras. The off-line analysis is made on series of digitized images. Our application is aimed at characterizing the behavior of the blades subjected to impacts during the sequence, by studying the deformations of their leading edges. The mathematical gray-scale morphology is first used. Two processing lines are then proposed: the extraction of a binary skeleton of the objects, using a new pruning method, or an active curve modeling of the leading edges (snake).