MORPHOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION OF RECYCLED SANDS THROUGH IMAGE ANALYSIS

Construction and demolition waste (CDW) has become one of the most important environmental problems in large and medium-sized cities around the world. Classification and segregation of CDW particles constitute the main difficulties for their recycling. The present paper proposes a methodology for morphological classification of particles of recycled sands from CDW that consists in a typical supervised classification procedure. It uses size, shape and texture description parameters to discriminate between CDW particles from mortar, ceramic and concrete observed with scanning electron microscopy technique. The classification system reaches a reasonable success. The total success rate obtained is 73.96% and the success rates for mortar and ceramic are greater than 80%. The main limitation is the recognition of the concrete particles; the best result obtained for its success rate is 56.30%.