Tribology Transactions, 55: 606-614, 2012

C Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers

Copyright

ISSN: 1040-2004 print / 1547-397X online
DOI: 10.1080/10402004.2012.686086

Description of Wear Debris from On-Line Ferrograph

Images by Their Statistical Color

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TONGHAI WU, JUNQUN WANG, YEPING PENG, and YALI ZHANG

Theory of Lubrication and Bearing Institute
Xian Jiaotong University
710049, Xian, China

Analytical ferrography has been proved to be one of the

most popular methods for wear characterization. However, it is
limited by the real-time requirement of condition-based monitoring. A new wear characterization by on-line ferrograph images is proposed. The color of wear debris was studied based
on an on-line visual ferrograph (OLVF) sensor. Generally, the
features of on-line ferrograph images included low resolution,
high contamination, and wear debris chains. The weak color of
the wear debris, especially nonferrous metal debris, in an online ferrograph image was unavoidably merged into the mass
noises. Accordingly, the on-line images were converted from
the initial red, green, blue (RGB) format into hue, saturation,
intensity (HSI) for the description of color images. The transmitted image was binarized to locate all wear debris and the
wear debris was extracted by their pixels from the corresponding reflected image. The distributions of two HSI components,
hue and intensity, were used to characterize the color of online ferrograph images. Aiming at the global noise induced by
uneven light during sampling, the distributions of the hue and
intensity of the wear debris were subtracted by that of the reflected image. As a result, the statistical colors of wear debris
were extracted with the hue and intensity from the on-line ferrograph images. A designed experiment with manually prepared
oil samples revealed that the wear debris of three common metals could be well differentiated according to their colors via the
on-line ferrograph images. The method provides a primary exploration on describing the color of wear debris by on-line ferrograph images.

(Jones (1)). Evidently, analytical ferrography has played an irreplaceable role in the early detection of a machines fault
(Myshkin, et al. (2); Xiao (3); Roylance (4)) by providing a comprehensive examination of not only the morphology but also the
color of wear debris. In particular, the color of the wear debris
contains profound information on the wear debris materials and
sources (Tian and Hu (5)). However, analytical ferrography has
been confined to the laboratory due to the complex operations
et al. (6)). Consequently, the requirement of
involved (Macian,
real-time wear reporting, advanced by condition-based maintenance, has dramatically limited new applications of traditional
ferrograph analysis.
Various on-line digital sensors were developed to monitor
wear by providing quantitative particle concentration (Wang and
Yin (7); Zhang and Ren (8); Li, et al. (9)). Wear debris analysis provides more information beyond the concentration for condition monitoring. Therefore, even in on-line monitoring, wear
debris images are still the most profound source of information.
Wear characterization via on-line ferrograph images with a new
on-line visual ferrograph (OLVF) sensor was proposed in previous work (Wu, et al. (10)). The dimensional features of wear
debris were comprehensively studied to describe the wear mechanisms. However, the color of wear debris was neglected due to
on-line features such as low resolution, random, and noise (Wu,
et al. (11)). Therefore, investigations on the color of wear debris
via on-line images are significant for on-line wear characterization.
Closely correlated with wear materials and mechanisms, the
color of wear debris has been studied in analytical ferrography
(Podsiadlo and Stachowiak (12)). Chen and Xie (13) studied the
color features of ferrographic images by matching them with the
colors of some characteristic wear debris sampled beforehand using a fuzzy clustering technique. However, the color of an on-line
image has a wide distribution and the distinct color clusters cannot be defined. Other studies by Myshkin, et al. (14) and Yin (15)
simplified the color extraction of wear debris using principal component analysis by focusing on a single type of wear debris. The
color of a single type of wear debris represents the features of definite characteristic wear debrisand fails to be applied to an overall image analysis (Yin (15); Li and Wang (16)). In addition, it is
difficult to focus on a single type of wear debris in dynamic sampling. Generally, there are two critical problems in the color description of on-line wear debris. First, the wear debris should be

KEY WORDS
Ferrography; Wear Particle Analysis; Oil Monitoring; Image
Processing; Color Feature

INTRODUCTION
Wear characterization by ferrograph analysis provides great
insight into the actual wear of vital machinery and equipment

Manuscript received November 9, 2011

Manuscript accepted November 11, 2012
Review led by Robert Errichello

606

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Color Description of On-Line Wear Debris

607

Fig. 1Typical images of wear debris using analytical ferrography and OLVF: (a) analytical ferrograph image and (b) OLVF image. (color figure available
online.)

automatically separated from the background with the closest

color match. Second, the overall color distribution of different
types of wear debris needs to be identified in one image. Therefore, the color description for on-line wear debris remains a challenge in on-line ferrography.
In this article, a new description of the color of wear debris
via on-line ferrograph images was investigated for engineering
applications. The features of on-line ferrograph images were
generalized. Correspondingly, the extraction of wear debris from
the on-line ferrograph images was studied to avoid loss of weak
color information. Statistical color distribution was investigated
to identify different types of wear debris in HSI color space.
Finally, experiments were carried out to verify the identification
of several types of metal debris.

ON-LINE FERROGRAPH IMAGES BY OLVF

Profound information can be extracted from a ferrograph
image using analytical ferrography. However, there are great
differences between off-line and on-line images. Analytical
ferrography provides magnified images of wear debris from
manually sampled lubricants, and OLVF provides images of
on-line wear debris carried by a running lubricant. Analytical
ferrography reports the past wear condition by identifying the
well-chosen images experimentally (Yu and Dai (17)), whereas
OLVF identifies the real-time wear condition by intelligently
processing the on-line images with rapid and efficient algorithms.
Figure 1 shows typical images provided by the analytical ferrograph and the OLVF, respectively. As shown in Fig. 1a, the
ferrograph image shows details of each type of wear debris. In
contrast, the OLVF image in Fig. 1b provides only overall and
fuzzy information on the wear debris. By comparison, on-line images have some inherent disadvantages (Wu, et al. (11)):
1. It is difficult and time-consuming to identify each type of wear
debris from their chains, not to mention details on the color of
the characteristic wear debris.

2. The unevenness of the light due to the variant transparency

and astigmatism of the passing oil complicates background
color, whereas the ferrograph image has a single and stable
background color.
3. On-line images may contain wear debris of various colors.
However, nonferrous metal debris in characteristic colors is
always in minor proportion.

These disadvantages make on-line monitoring via ferrograph images more difficult compared with off-line means. However, the
advantages of on-line images, such as automatic and intensive
sampling, make on-line analysis highly correspondent to realtime wear conditions.
A high-quality example from the gear of a scraper conveyor
was chosen for a detailed explanation. Two kinds of on-line images, the transmitted and reflected images sampled simultaneously by the OLVF, are displayed in Fig. 2. The contour of wear
debris can be identified from the transmitted image and color details from the reflected image. Although details of the wear debris
are distinct in Fig. 2, information of the on-line images from an
engine monitoring is ambiguous and obscure, as shown in Fig. 1b.
Detailed features of characteristic wear debris, the focus of analytical ferrography, can be hardly identified. A statistical characterization, rather than a detailed one, is of practical significance
for on-line images when taking the advantages of on-line monitoring into consideration.

STATISTICAL COLOR FEATURES OF ON-LINE WEAR

DEBRIS
On-line monitoring has the advantages of real-time and longterm, thus emphasizing statistics instead of an accurate report.
Therefore, a new method characterized by the statistical color
features of on-line wear debris is investigated as follows. A new
color model was adopted to describe an on-line image. Color extraction focused on wear debris rather than the overall image was

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Fig. 2Two kinds of on-line ferrograph images: (a) transmitted image and (b) reflected image. (color figure available online.)

investigated and the statistical color features of on-line wear debris were constructed for material description.

sity. For facilitation, the color of on-line images was converted

from the initial RGB model into the HSI model and the conversion formulas are given as follows (Kong and Ibrahim (18)):

Principle of HSI Model

Color models have been widely used for the description of
color images (Myshkin, et al. (14)). The images provided by
OLVF are initially expressed with the RGB model. As shown
in Fig. 3, the RGB model represents colors with three components red, green, and blue. The three components are highly correlated and varied with luminance synchronously, which limits
RGB model from characterizing color images.
The HSI model, close to the perception of human, is suitable for the description of color images (Myshkin, et al. (14)). As
shown in Fig. 4, the HSI model is composed of three components
hue, saturation, and intensity. In particular, hue and saturation
reflect the attribute of color, and intensity reflects the light inten-

Fig. 3RGB color model.

H=

if B G

360

if B > G

S = 1

Fig. 4HSI color model.

3
[min(R, G, B)]
R+G+B

[1]

[2]

Color Description of On-Line Wear Debris

609

Fig. 5On-line images by OLVF sensor: (a) transmitted image; (b) reflected image; and (c) reflected image of the background. (color figure available
online.)

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I =

R+G+B
3

[3]

Here, R, G, and B are the three components of the RGB

model and H, S, and I are the three components of the HSI
model. H denotes the hue, ranging from 0 to 360 . S and I are
dimensionless quantities denoting saturation and intensity in
the range from 0 to 1. For facilitation, the ranges are enlarged
by multiplying by 100. is an intermedia variable and can be
calculated as:



1/2 [(R G) + (R B)]
[4]
= arccos
1/2
[(R G)2 + (R G)(G B)]

Rapid Segmentation of Wear Debris from On-Line

Ferrograph Images
As shown in Fig. 2b, there is abundant information on the
color of wear debris in a reflected image. However, according
to the second feature of on-line ferrograph images, the proportion of the color characterizing different kinds of wear debris is
not at the same level. Take the engine as an example. Compared
to the ferrous wear debris, the nonferrous wear debrisfor example, Al and Cuis in the minority and varies with the wear
procedure. On the other hand, the background noise is unavoidably introduced into these on-line images due to their on-line
features. Consequently, the colors of a little special wear debris
are inevitably merged into the primary colors if directly extracted
from the on-line image as reported in analytical ferrography (Yin
(15)).
Accordingly, a new method was adopted to accurately identify minor colors in on-line images. The principle was interpreted
with the examples in Fig. 5. Figure 5a shows a transmitted image,
and the corresponding reflected image and the background image
are shown in Figs. 5b and 5c, respectively. As shown in Fig. 5, the
contour and color of wear debris can be identified respectively
from the transmitted and the reflected images. Moreover, the
color of wear debris, compared to that of the background image
in Fig. 5c, was more sensitive to the uneven light. Thus, the color
of wear debris was hard to extract directly from the reflected
image. A prelocation of the wear debris was studied with the
transmitted image. The transmitted image was binarized and the
result is shown in Fig. 6. There are only two pure colors, white and
black. Mathematically, the binary image in Fig. 6 was denoted by
f (i, j) and that in Fig. 5b was denoted by g (i, j). Here, f (i, j) and

g (i, j) are two arrays in the same size and f (i, j) was defined as:


1, in white pixel point
f (i, j ) =
[5]
0, in black pixel point
By multiplying the two arrays, a new image, denoted by C (i,
j), can be achieved as shown in Fig. 7. Here, C (i, j) is expressed
as:
C(i, j ) = g(i, j ) f (i, j )

[6]

As shown in Fig. 7, the wear debris was distinctly segmented

from the reflected image without any distortion in color. The segmented image contained pure background color and hence eliminated most light noises from background. The method skillfully
solved the second inherent disadvantage of on-line images and
made further investigations feasible.

Statistical Color Feature of On-Line Wear Debris Based

on Reflected Image
The on-line ferrograph image was converted from the initial
RGB model into the HSI model. The components H, S, and I

Fig. 6Binary result of Fig. 5a.

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Fig. 7Image of segmented wear debris. (color figure available online.)

were equally divided into several sections to correspond with the

color in a standard color wheel as shown in Fig. 8. Then the probability for each color division could be calculated as:
P(k) =

nk
(k = 1, 2, .., L)
N

[7]

where P(k) is the probability of the kth division; nk is the number

of the pixels in the kth division; L is the number of divisions; and
N is the total number of pixels of overall wear debris.
In this work, the hue was divided into 360 sections, and the
saturation and the intensity were both divided into 100 sections.
The calculations of H, S, and I are shown in Fig. 9. As seen in
Fig. 9a, the hue was distributed from 30 to 270 , which was too
wide to correspond with the definite color spans in the standard
color wheel. Further investigation showed that the saturation was
mainly concentrated in a relatively small range less than 20, and
the intensity was distributed in a wide range with the main concentration from 20 to 80.

Fig. 9Distributions of the hue and saturation of the image in Fig. 7: (a)
hue; (b) intensity; and (c) saturation.

Fig. 8Standard color wheel. (color figure available online.)

Generally, the color of an object is influenced by the light

source, circumstance, and even the vision system used (Myshkin,
et al. (14)). As shown in Fig. 5, the on-line images contained a
large amount of noise induced by nonuniform light during imaging. The images of the wear debris retained this noise even when
separated from the background, as shown in Fig. 7. The background image in Fig. 5c was analyzed and the results are shown
in Fig. 10.
As seen in Fig. 10a, the hue of the wear debris was distributed
from 0 to 360 and was concentrated in two intervals from 0 to 90
and 160 to 360 , respectively. This indicated that the wear debris

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Color Description of On-Line Wear Debris

611

Fig. 11Result of hue distribution in Fig. 8 subtracted by that of the

background in Fig. 10: (a) hue and (b) intensity.

Specifically, the color distributions of the wear debris were subtracted from that of the background. The result of the hue is presented in Fig. 11a and that of the intensity is shown in Fig. 11b.
As shown in Fig. 11, the distribution of hue was narrowed after
denoising with the main interval from 50 to 240 , which indicated
a relatively wide color of the wear debris. Further inspection into
the initial image agreed with this result. On the other hand, the
distribution of the intensity was greatly concentrated, which facilitated color identification.
Fig. 10Distributions of hue and saturation of the background image in
Fig. 5c: (a) hue; (b) intensity; and (c) saturation.

EXPERIMENT AND VERIFICATION

and the background had the same color content. The intensity
showed a wide distribution and coincidence somewhat with that
of the image of the wear debris. On the other hand, the close distribution of the saturation between the images of the background
and wear debris indicated that the saturation was insensitive to
the different colors. Hence, denoising was necessary for the image of the segmented wear debris.
The background noise had the same influence on the color of
the wear debris. Furthermore, the noise was assumed to be simply superimposed on the wear debris. A linear model of color was
adopted and the noise was peeled directly from the initial signals.

To verify the wear debris color extraction method, an experiment was designed by providing different manual samples in the
lab. The new oil was mixed with the different metal powders with
a content of 200 ppm to simulate an engine application. Three
kinds of oil samples were prepared with common powders of iron,
copper, and aluminum (size 74 m). One on-line image for each
sample was sampled by the OLVF sensor.
The images are shown in Fig.12. The transmitted images for
iron, copper, and aluminum are shown in detail in Figs. 12a12c,
respectively. The corresponding reflected images are shown in
Figs. 12d12f and the background image is shown in Fig. 5c.
It can be observed in Figs. 12 that the colors of iron, copper,
and aluminum debris were approximately pale yellow, pale red,

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Fig. 12On-line images sampled from three oil samples mixed with three kinds of commercial powders of iron, copper, and aluminum: transmitted image
of (a) iron sample; (b) copper sample; and (c) aluminum sample; and reflected image of (d) iron sample; (e) copper sample; and (f) aluminum
sample. (color figure available online.)

and pale cyan, respectively. Accordingly, the images were analyzed and the color features of the wear debris were extracted as
shown in Fig. 13. Figure 13a shows the distributions of the hue
for different types of metal debris after filtering the background
noise. Figure 13b shows the corresponding distributions of the intensity for different types of metal debris.
It can be seen in Fig. 13a that the distributions of the three
types of wear debris were differentiated by their weights. The
main distribution of hue for copper debris, in the interval 040 ,
was distinctly isolated from the other debris. However, the distributions of the iron and aluminum debris were overlapped and
could hardly be differentiated by the hue values. The main distribution of aluminum debris, in the interval 60100 , was distinctly isolated from other debris. As generalized from the results,
the copper debris showed a concentrated pale red color and aluminum debris showed the highest reflectivity, which agreed with
the materials nature. Accordingly, the color of copper and aluminum debris was identified by the critical point in the distribution of the hue and intensity.
In practical applications, oil contains wear debris of different
metals, and different metals have different color features. Therefore, the identification of different types of wear debris in one
image shows more practical meaning. A further verification was
performed using the new oil mixed with three kinds of metal debris.
The on-line images of the transmitted image, reflected image,
and background were sampled as shown in Fig. 14. Those images
had the same on-line features as mentioned above, but the different colors of debris. As shown in Fig. 14, different colors were
the main feature with the mixed debris of copper, aluminum, and
iron. The wear debris was identified with the method and verified
by observation with the naked eye.

Fig. 13Color component distribution of the wear debris in the images in

Fig. 12 after filtering the background noise: (a) Hue component
and (b) Intensity component.

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Fig. 14On-line ferrograph images with several types of wear debris: (a) transmitted image of on-line ferrograph images with several types of wear
debris; (b) reflected image of on-line ferrograph images with several types of wear debris; and (c) reflected image of background. (color figure
available online.)

Fig. 16Results of the analysis of the wear debris in Fig. 14: (a) image of
segmented wear debris and (b) wear debris marked with several
colors. (color figure available online.)

Fig. 15Distributions of hue and intensity of the wear debris in Fig. 14:
(a) distribution of hue after filtering the background noise and
(b) distribution of intensity after filtering the background noise.

With the above procedures, the distribution of the hue was

calculated as shown in Fig. 15a and that of the intensity as shown
in Fig. 15b. Accordingly, the critical point for copper debris was
40 and the copper debris was identified by the hue component.
On the other hand, the aluminum debris was identified with the
critical point of 60 in the intensity distribution. The pixels in the

TABLE 1QUANTITATIVE CONTENTS OF THE DEBRIS OF THREE

METALS IN THE IMAGE IN FIG.16
Metal
Concentration

Al

Fe

Cu

25%

51%

24%

image were marked with different colors according to the identification and the result is shown in Fig. 16. Copper was marked with
red, iron with yellow, and aluminum with green. For comparison,
the segmented debris image was revealed correspondingly. The
comparison indicated that the debris of different metals was well
identified. Moreover, the quantitative contents of the debris of
the three metals were calculated as shown in Table 1.

CONCLUSIONS
Wear sources and mechanisms reflected by the color of the
wear debris are the basis for wear characterization. Accordingly,
the method for describing the color of on-line wear debris was
studied via on-line ferrograph images. A new method for extracting weak colors from on-line images was discussed. The components of the HSI model, hue and intensity, were used to describe
the color of wear debris. The wear debris was extracted from the
reflected image by prelocation with the transmitted image. Aiming at the noise induced by uneven light during sampling, the distributions of the hue and the intensity were subtracted from that
of the background image. Finally, the color of wear debris was

614

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characterized by the combination of the distribution of hue and

intensity.
The designed experiment revealed that the dominant color
of definite metal debris could be well identified with the critical values of the hue and the intensity. Further investigation
showed that the color of mixed metal debris could also be identified in one image. The method provides a method for describing
the color of wear debris by on-line ferrograph images. However,
the description of weak and fuzzy colors of wear debris under
severe conditionsan engine, for exampleneeds further and
more comprehensive investigation.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The present research was financially supported by the National Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 50905135), a
China Postdoctoral Science Foundationfunded project (Grant
No. 201003672), and the Ph.D. Programs Foundation of the
Ministry of Education of China (No. 200806981024). The author acknowledges Professor Yu Zhao and Sreenivasa Rao Bollimuntafor proofreading. The author is also grateful to the anonymous referees and the Editor for their constructive comments.

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