Image Segmentation of Vickers Indentations Using Shape from Focus

To measure the hardness of a material, an indenter is pressed into the material and the deformation is measured. As we focus on Vickers hardness testing, our exercise is to compute the diagonal lengths of a square indentation. We especially investigate if it is possible to reconstruct the shape of the indentation by the use of the Shape-from-Focus method. We show that the shape information alone does not contain enough information for a robust segmentation. However, we incorporate the depth information into an effective existing approach and achieve significantly better results.