Estimating the Workability of Concrete with a Stereovision Camera during Mixing

The correct workability of concrete is an essential parameter for its placement and compaction. However, an absence of automatic and transparent measurement methods to estimate the workability of concrete hinders the adaptation from laborious traditional methods such as the slump test. In this paper, we developed a machine-learning framework for estimating the slump class of concrete in the mixer using a stereovision camera. Depth data from five different slump classes was transformed into Haralick texture features to train several machine-learning classifiers. The best-performing classifier achieved a multiclass classification accuracy of 0.8179 with the XGBoost algorithm. Furthermore, we found through statistical analysis that while the denoising of depth data has little effect on the accuracy, the feature extraction of mixer blades and the choice of region of interest significantly increase the accuracy and the efficiency of the classifiers. The proposed framework shows robust results, indicating that stereovision is a competitive solution to estimate the workability of concrete during concrete production.