Measurements for displacement and deformation at high temperature by using edge detection of digital image

In this work, we propose a structural deformation measuring method based on structural feature processing (straight line/edge detection) of the recorded digital images for specimens subjected to a high-temperature environment. Both radiation light and oxidation at high temperatures challenge the optics-based measurements. The images of a rectangular piece of copper specimen are obtained by using a bandpass filtering method at high temperatures, then all the edges are detected by using an edge detection operator, and then a Hough transform is conducted to search the straight edges for the calculation of deformation. Especially, due to the severe oxidation, a special seed strategy is adopted to reduce the oxidation effect and obtain an accurate result. For validation, the structural thermal deformation and the values of coefficients of thermal expansion for the copper specimen are measured and compared with data in the literature. The results reveal that the proposed method is accurate to measure the deformation of the structures at high temperatures.