Thomas De Kerf

University of Antwerp | UA · Faculty of Applied Engineering

The high incidence of oil spills in port areas poses a serious threat to the environment, prompting the need for efficient detection mechanisms. Utilizing automated drones for this purpose can significantly improve the speed and accuracy of oil spill detection. Such advancements not only expedite cleanup operations, reducing environmental harm but...

Optical hyperspectral cameras capture the spectral reflectance of materials. Since many materials behave as heterogeneous intimate mixtures with which each photon interacts differently, the relationship between spectral reflectance and material composition is very complex. Quantitative validation of spectral unmixing algorithms requires high-qualit...

In non-destructive inspections today, the size of the sample being examined is often limited to fit within the field of view of the camera being used. When examining larger specimens, multiple image sequences need to be stitched together into one image. Due to uneven illumination, the combined image may have artificial defects. This manuscript prov...

Accurate checkerboard detection is of vital importance for computer vision applications, and a variety of checkerboard detectors have been developed in the past decades. While some detectors are able to handle partially occluded checkerboards, they fail when a large occlusion completely divides the checkerboard. We propose a new checkerboard detect...

In this work, we generated a comprehensive laboratory ground truth dataset of intimately mixed mineral powders. For this, five clay powders (Kaolin, Roof clay, Red clay, mixed clay, and Calcium hydroxide) were mixed homogeneously to prepare 325 samples of 60 binary, 150 ternary, 100 quaternary, and 15 quinary mixtures. Thirteen different hyperspect...

Optical hyperspectral cameras capture the spectral reflectance of materials. Since many materials behave as heterogeneous intimate mixtures with which each photon interacts differently, the relationship between spectral reflectance and material composition is very complex. Quantitative validation of spectral unmixing algorithms requires high-qualit...

This study presents a novel method for the detection and quantification of atmospheric corrosion products on carbon steel. Using hyperspectral imaging (HSI) in the short-wave infrared range (SWIR) (900-1700 nm), we are able to identify the most common corrosion minerals such as: α-FeO(OH) (goethite), γ-FeO(OH) (lepidocrocite), and γ-Fe2O3 (maghemit...

This study presents a novel method for the detection and quantification of atmospheric corrosion products on carbon steel. Using hyperspectral imaging (HSI) in the short-wave infrared range (SWIR) (900-1700 nm), we are able to identify the most common corrosion minerals such as: α FeO(OH) (goethite), γ FeO(OH) (lepidocrocite), and γ Fe2O3 (maghemit...

In this study, we investigate the use of hyperspectral imaging (HSI) to inspect the formation of corrosion products on gal-vanised carbon steel samples. Ten samples were subjected to an accelerated corrosion test with different exposure times. The analysis is performed in a two-step procedure: First, the different corrosion minerals are identified...

In this study, we propose a new method to identify corrosion minerals in carbon steel using hyperspectral imaging (HSI) in the shortwave infrared range (900–1700 nm). Seven samples were artificially corroded using a neutral salt spray test and examined using a hyperspectral camera. A normalized cross-correlation algorithm is used to identify four d...

Bitumen, also called asphalt binder, is the key component in asphalt mixtures. Studies to investigate the microstructure of this material show a rich morphology, especially the formation of bee structures in bitumen containing wax. Most research in this field has investigated these microstructures using commercial image processing software that nee...

In this article, we report the use of a Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope (CLSM) to apply a qualitative assessment of atmospheric corrosion on steel samples. From the CLSM, we obtain high-resolution images, together with a 3D heightmap. The performance of four different segmentation algorithms that use the high-resolution images as input is qualit...

The detection of oil spills in water is a frequently researched area, but most of the research has been based on very large patches of crude oil on offshore areas. We present a novel framework for detecting oil spills inside a port environment, while using unmanned areal vehicles (UAV) and a thermal infrared (IR) camera. This framework is split int...