Image Processing Approach for Estimating the Degree
of Surface Degradation by Corrosion
Elena Crina Cringasu, Andrei Dragomirescu, Carmen-Anca Safta
University Politehnica of Bucharest, Power Engineering Faculty
Bucharest, Romania
safta.carmenanca@gmail.com
Abstract—Hydraulic machines are permanently exposed to
degradation by erosion. Erosion corrosion can be a very
aggressive one, being caused by the environment in which the
machine operates. This paper proposes a method for assessing
the degree of degradation by erosion corrosion based on image
processing using open source software. Such a method, which is
cheap and easy to implement, offers the possibility of monitoring
the surface degradation in time and it can be useful in the
maintenance of hydraulic turbines or wind turbines. To
illustrate the proposed method, a case study for a wicket gate
blade is presented.
Index Terms—erosion, corrosion, image processing, preventive
maintenance
I. INTRODUCTION
Corrosion is the result of the of the interaction between
materials and their environment. Corrosion of metals appears
mostly in electrochemical processes. There are many forms of
corrosion [1]. Erosion corrosion is “the result of a combination
of an aggressive chemical environment and high fluid-surface
velocities” [2]. From this point of view, abrasive erosion and
cavitational erosion are types of erosion corrosion often found
in hydraulic machines-hydraulic turbines and pumps [3].
Abrasive erosion, in case of hydraulic turbines, is caused
by the impact of water and silt particles against solid surfaces.
General corrosion and erosion corrosion often act
simultaneously on metallic surfaces. When they act separately,
the damages are similar and the true cause is established after
a thorough study. Corrosion and abrasive erosion produce
changes at the structure level of the materials used in the
manufacturing of important components of hydraulic
machines [3]. The first effect of erosion corrosion against a
metallic surface is the rust stain.
Since 1950, in the scientific literature, the corrosion and
abrasive erosion have been identified as important issues of
hydraulic turbines [4].
For the maintenance of hydraulic machines in general and
of hydraulic turbines in particular, it is important to have a
method of monitoring the surface of the runner blades, guide
978-1-5386-3943-6/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
vanes, and any other metallic structure which comes into
direct contact with the water flow. Grecu [5] proposed the
usage of digital image processing techniques for monitoring
the surface degradation of hydraulic turbine runners.
In this paper, a quantitative method to analyze the
evolution of the rust spots over time by “measuring” the area
of the eroded/corroded surface is presented. The method is
based on an image processing technique for analyzing the rust
spots and can be used in case of big structures that cannot be
easily dismantled and transported. It is the case of hydraulic
turbine runners which are subjected to cavitational and/or
abrasive erosion.
In Section II, the proposed method is thoroughly
described. To illustrate the usage of the method, a case study
is presented in Section III. Conclusions and final remarks are
formulated in Section IV.
II. IMAGE PROCESSING METHOD
Digital image processing techniques are based on a
specific signal processing of the input image to get an output
image with certain characteristics and/or a set of parameters
related to the image [6]. Usually, the images produced by
common cameras show a slight lack of contrast, clarity, and
sharpness. Therefore, these image characteristics could require
a certain boost prior to applying any advanced processing
techniques, like those described below.
The method presented hereinafter for evaluating the
evolution of corrosion is based on using the Python Imaging
Library (PIL) [7] and the Open Source Computer Vision
Library (OpenCV) [8]. Both libraries are free, yet very
powerful and efficient. It should be pointed out from the very
beginning that the method can be efficient only if the corroded
(or rusted) areas stand clearly out against the surrounding,
uncorroded, surface. Rust appears normally in different shades
of orange, red, and brown. A protective paint coating should
have such a color that allows rust spots to be clearly visible
when they appear. Under these circumstances, the image
processing can be carried out in four steps, starting from an
original image obtained by properly photographing the area
affected by corrosion.
 In the first step, the original image is desaturated, i.e. it is
converted to a grayscale image, that contains only gray tones.
The condition to go to the next step is that on the grayscale
image the corroded areas are clearly visible against the
uncorroded surface. This means that the corroded areas should
be either significantly darker or lighter than the uncorroded
surface. When this condition is not met, the color of the
protective painting must be appropriately changed at post-
processing, prior to desaturating the image.
In the second step, the histogram of the grayscale image is
calculated. The histogram is a graphical representation of the
tonal distribution in the image, which plots the number of
pixels for each tonal value. The horizontal axis represents the
tonal variation, while the vertical axis represents the number
of pixels for each tone. For a grayscale image, the left side of
the histogram corresponds to black and dark tones, the middle
side corresponds to medium gray tones, and the right side
corresponds to light and white tones. Normally, the tonal
range is divided into 256 bins having values that span from 0
(pure black) to 255 (pure white) with an increment of 1.
In the third step of the method, thresholding is applied to
the grayscale image to obtain a binary (or bi-level) image, that
contains only pure black and pure white pixels. The threshold
value required in this step should be carefully chosen based on
the histogram calculated in the previous step. A method for
choosing the threshold value is indicated in the subsequent
case study. Depending on whether the corroded areas are
darker or lighter than the uncorroded surface on the grayscale
image, rust becomes black or white, respectively, on the
binary image. At this step, it becomes easy to assess the
degree of corrosion by counting the number of pixels that
correspond to rust.
Depending on luminosity, when applying thresholding to
the grayscale image the possibility exists for some pixels on
the corroded area to get the same value as the pixels on the
uncorroded surface. Therefore, the degree of corrosion
assessed at the third step might not be accurate enough. To
mitigate this problem, a fourth step is recommended, in which
the contours of the corroded areas are found together with
their moment invariants [9]. Based on the moment invariants,
other important information regarding the corroded surfaces
can be derived: geometrical areas, centroids, and orientations.
The degree of corrosion assessed based on the areas obtained
in this step are expected to be more accurate, provided that the
algorithm of finding the contours keeps only the exterior
contours of the rust spots.
III. CASE STUDY: EVOLUTION OF CORROSION ON A GUIDE
VANE OF A BULB TURBINE
The usage of the method proposed for estimating the
evolution of corrosion is illustrated for a guide vane of a bulb
turbine. This guide vane is currently showcased in the
courtyard of University Politehnica of Bucharest. Its photo is
presented in Fig. 1. The guide vane is in a good technical
condition. To keep the guide vane from corroding, its surface
was coated with a gray protective paint. But even under the
circumstances of being no more in operation, the guide vane
has suffered from the action of the environment (or weather
conditions) and rust spots have appeared.
Figure 1. Guide vane of a Bulb turbine that operated 30 years on Olt River,
Romania.
The guide vane was monitored during an interval of six
months. Photos of a small area affected by corrosion, that were
taken once every three months, are presented in Fig. 2a. It can
be seen that the corroded area evolved quite rapidly during the
monitoring period. At time t0, a large rust spot is clearly visible
on the left side of the monitored area. It can also be seen that
the protective paint started to flake off on the right side of the
area, exposing to weather conditions the metallic surface
beneath. After three months, at time t0 + 3 months, the flaked
paint disappeared and a second patch of rust appeared on the
guide vane surface. Additionally, the area of the rust spot to the
left has visibly increased. After another three months, at
time t0 + 6 months, the rusted areas have increased in such a
manner that the two rust spots have merged, denoting a quite
aggressive corrosion process. To better understand how
aggressive the corrosion was, it should be emphasized that the
materials used for manufacturing the parts of a hydraulic
turbine are corrosion and cavitation resistant, with high
hardness and high mechanical strength [10].
The entire image processing of the monitored surface was
carried out with a custom-made program written in Python,
that uses specialized functions from PIL and OpenCV. The
processing followed the steps of the image processing
methodology presented in Section II.
First, each original image from Fig. 2a was desaturated
with the convert function from the Image module in PIL. The
results are presented in Fig. 2b. As it can be seen, each
corroded area is represented by dark tones of gray, while the
protective coating is represented by medium and light tones of
gray.
Second, the histogram of each desaturated image was
calculated. The histograms obtained are presented in Fig. 2c.
Each histogram has two main regions. One is located in the
range of dark tones and corresponds to the corroded surfaces.
The other is located mainly in the range of light tones and
corresponds to the still intact portions of protective coating.
The two regions are separated by thresholds located at grey
levels of around 100.
 Figure 2. Illustration of the image processing workflow for obtaining the evolution of corroded surafces.

Third, a Savitzky-Golay filter was applied to each
histogram, using third order polynomials on successive
subsets of 25 bins. The smooth curves obtained, plotted in red
in Fig. 2c, have local minima between the two main regions of
each histogram. These minima were extracted from the curves
and were used for thresholding the grayscale images in Fig. 2b
to obtain the binary images in Fig. 2d. In each binary image,
the corroded surfaces are rendered by black pixels. The
number of black pixels was counted with the function
histogram from the PIL library. The value obtained was
subsequently divided to the total number of pixels in the
image to get the relative area of the corroded surfaces. As it
can be seen in Fig. 2d, this area increased in six months from
10.94% to 37.90%. However, these estimated values cannot be
considered as being very accurate, since it is clearly visible
that the thresholding process leaves on the areas that
correspond to the corroded surfaces some white pixels that
should be but are not accounted for.
Fourth, the binary images obtained in the third step were
additionally processed with the findContours function from
OpenCV to find the contours of the corroded surfaces. The
results are presented in Fig. 2e, were the contours are rendered
in light green. The function findContours returns a contours
hierarchy having a tree structure, where each contour has a
parent, into which it is contained, and children, that are
contours contained inside it. The contours of interest for the
methodology described here are only those that mark the
edges of the rusted spots. They can be easily found at the root
of the hierarchy, i.e. they are those contours that have no
parents. Beside the total corroded area, Fig. 2e shows the areas
of the largest rust spots as well. Based on the contours, it can
be estimated that the corroded area increased in six months
from 11.41% to 39.87%. For the case study presented here, the
differences between the corroded areas estimated only by
thresholding and those estimated by finding the contours are
in a range from roughly 0.5% to 1.1%. It can be noticed that
the thresholding consistently offers lower estimates of the
corroded areas.
IV. CONCLUSIONS AND FINAL REMARKS
The method proposed to evaluate the degree of
degradation of a surface caused by corrosion can give a
quantitative information about the process, such as the area
and the rate of corrosion. Unfortunately, the volume of the lost
material cannot be determined. Hence, the wear of the
structure cannot be estimated. Nevertheless, for hydraulic
turbines the method can be applied in situ as a preventive
maintenance method.
To preserve the accuracy of the method, when
subsequently taking the photographs it is required to keep both
the same distance between the camera and the surface and the
same focal distance of the lenses. This requirement can be
easily fulfilled by using a tape rule and a camera with prime
lenses (i.e. lenses with fixed focal distance). The brightness of
the subsequent photographs should be preserved as well. For
this purpose, the usage of a flash is recommended.
According to the ASTM G65 [11], resistance to abrasive
erosion of different metals and their degree of wear can be
determined as a ratio between the mass of the specimen after
the experiment and the mass of the specimen before the
experiment. The method allows the experimental
measurement of the amount of material lost through abrasive
erosion.
By comparison with the standardized method we will be
able to find a connection between the standard method and the
proposed method of image processing analysis. This will
allow us to determine the error and uncertainty in using the
proposed preventive maintenance method.
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