3D shape estimation of wires from 3D x-ray CT images of electrical cables

Abstract

Electrical cables consist of numerous wires. The 3D shape of individual wires in the cables significantly affects their characteristics. With the increasing diversity of wire structures, understanding the 3D shape of each wire in an electrical cable is crucial for analyzing characteristics such as bending stiffness. To accurately estimate the bending stiffness of actual electrical cables, a detailed 3D representation of each wire is required. Therefore, it is important to obtain the 3D shape of actual electrical cable wires using non-destructive inspection. In this study, we propose a new method to associate wires using particle tracking techniques. The proposed method performs wire tracking in two steps, linking detected wire positions between adjacent frames and connecting segmented wires across frames. The effectiveness of the proposed method was evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively. In the quantitative evaluation, the correctness of the tracking was evaluated using the data with artificial noise added to the real data detection results. The proposed method achieves highly accurate wire tracking when there is little undetected noise, and shows robustness to over-detection.