Abstract:A new method for separating complex touching equiaxed and lamellar alpha phases in the optical micrograph of titanium alloy was proposed for quantitative characterization. This new method involves three steps. First, concave points of the microstructural feature are identified with a threshold of the concaveness of the corner points which are extracted from the binarized image. Secondly, concave points pairs are selected from the concave points group established by means of marker circle or distance. Third, whether a candidate separation line which connects two concave points within a pair can be accepted or not is determined by the proposed four rules. The obtained results show that this method is effective on separating complex touching microstructural features.

Key words: titanium alloy; microstructural feature; separation method