ABSTRACT
Though physical counting of fragments can correlate very closely to the actual size distribution in the muckpile it is very cumbersome, time consuming and exhaustive. Considering these researchers have been working over a period of time to evolve methods to assess fragmentation. Image processing techniques proved to be suitable and effective. National Institute of Rock Mechanics (NIRM) has procured the latest version of WipFrag, which is proved to be commercially available across and has been using it in assessing the fragmentation at different sites. WipFrag accepts images from a variety of sources such as camcorders, fixed cameras, photographs, or digital files. It uses automatic algorithms to identify individual blocks, and create an outline ‘net’. WipFrag allows manual editing to insert missing boundaries between fused fragments, and to delete false edges where a fragment has disintegrated into two or more pieces. It measures the 2-D net and reconstructs a 3-D distribution using principles of geometric probability. Figure 1 shows the generated net-edger detection and Figure 2 shows manually edited edge detection which is show as the identified fragments through Wipfrag.
