J Mater Sci (2016) 51:3772–3783
DOI 10.1007/s10853-015-9695-4
Methods for fibre orientation analysis of X-ray tomography
images of steel fibre reinforced concrete (SFRC)
Heiko Herrmann1,2 • Emiliano Pastorelli1 • Aki Kallonen3 • Jussi-Petteri Suuronen3,4
Received: 11 December 2015 / Accepted: 19 December 2015 / Published online: 11 January 2016
Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
Abstract One of the most important factors to determine
the mechanical properties of a fibre composite material is
the orientation of the fibres in the matrix. This paper pre-
sents Hessian matrix-based algorithms to retrieve the ori-
entation of individual fibres out of steel fibre reinforced
cementitious composites samples scanned with an X-ray
computed tomography scanner. The software implemented
with the algorithms includes a massive data filtering
component to remove noise from the data-sets and prepare
them correctly for the analysis. Due to its short computa-
tional times and limited need for user intervention, the
software is able to process and analyse large batches of
data in short periods and provide results in a variety of
visual and numerical formats. The application and com-
parison of these algorithms lead to further insight into the
material behaviour. In contrast to the usual assumption that
the fibres act only along their main axis, it is shown that the
contribution of hooked-end fibres in other directions may
be noticeable. This means that fibres, depending on their
shape, should act as orthotropic inclusions. The methods
& Heiko Herrmann
hh@cens.ioc.ee
1
Centre for Nonlinear Studies, Institute of Cybernetics at
Tallinn University of Technology, Akadeemia tee 21,
12618 Tallinn, Estonia
2
Institute of Physics, Technische Universität Chemnitz,
09107 Chemnitz, Germany
3
Department of Physics, University of Helsinki, PO Box 64,
00014 Helsinki, Finland
4
Present Address: ESRF - The European Synchrotron,
CS40220, 38043 Grenoble Cedex 9, France
123
can be used by research laboratories and companies on an
everyday basis to obtain fibre orientations from samples,
which in turn can be used in research, to study stress–strain
behaviour, as input to constitutive models or for quality
assurance.
Introduction
Short fibre composites have become an important material
in many areas. One example is the building construction
industry where fibre reinforced concrete (FRC) is becom-
ing increasingly popular. In this material short fibres that
are inserted into the mass at the mixing stage shall bear part
of the tensile stress and can in part or completely replace
reinforcement with steel rebars. Different fibre materials
are in use, like polypropylene [1, 2] and glass [3], but steel
is the most common one. Shape, aspect ratio and length can
vary, so that straight, hooked-end and undulating (wavy)
fibres are used. In recent years, there have been many
experiments investigating the properties [4–10] of FRC and
studies of the orientation of short fibres in concrete [11–
18].
It is important to know the orientation of the fibres in
fibre reinforced materials, as their main contribution is
along their long axis. This is the direction in which tensile
stresses are carried by the fibre and in which it can bridge
cracks. If the distribution of the fibre orientations is not
isotropic, the material can be expected to show anisotropic
behaviour. Depending on the type of fibres, the orientation
distribution can either be easily predicted, as in the case of
long continuous fibres, fibre meshes or mats, or the pre-
diction can be more difficult as in the case of short fibres,
where the orientation distribution can depend on the posi-
tion in a structural element and on the casting process,
J Mater Sci (2016) 51:3772–3783
especially the flow of the concrete mass. Currently, each
casting is site specific, which differs from the laboratory
setting. There is a need to develop specialised casting
technologies for short FRC. In this case, nondestructive
testing methods are needed to obtain the fibre orientations.
While the extraction of samples from larger structural
elements, like plates, causes damage to the element, the
samples are not damaged and can be subjected to further
analysis and testing afterwards.
As the use of X-ray computed tomography (CT) has
become popular in materials science, several authors have
addressed the problem of extracting fibre orientations from
volumes obtained using CT [4, 20–23]. Some are using
commercial software, others their own in-house imple-
mentations. The solution used in [20, 23] is based on a
skeletonisation approach. First, a segmentation of matrix
and fibres is performed, and then for each separate object the
centre-line (skeleton) is calculated, further potentially
touching fibres are separated. The end-to-end vector of the
centre-line gives the orientation of the fibre. The commercial
solutions are part of general purpose visualisation and
analysis solutions and can require significant training. One
of the in-house solutions described in [21] is based on
Matlab and first segments the voxels belonging to different
fibres by thresholding and then interprets the voxels of each
fibre as a point-cloud. To each point-cloud, a linear regres-
sion is applied and the centre of the cloud calculated. From
this, it is possible to obtain the position and orientation of
each fibre. The other in-house solution used in [22] is based
on the Insight Toolkit (ITK) [24] and consists mainly of
thresholding, segmentation and calculating the orientation
and centre of each object. The apparent need to develop in-
house software for fibre orientation analysis seems to be
hindering the widespread use of CT for research on SFRC.
In this paper, the focus will be on obtaining the orien-
tation of hooked-end steel fibres by use of a Hessian
matrix-based analysis similar to [25], and part of the
algorithms have been presented in [26, 27]. The algorithm
will also work for straight fibres. The analysis algorithms
will be well documented and based on open-source
libraries like ITK and it is planned to release the soft-
ware—called lTANS [28]—as open-source.
One of the aims of developing the software has been to
provide a tool that can be used on an everyday basis by
research labs and companies without the need of long user
training. The fibre orientations obtained by this software can
be used in research for studying the mechanical behaviour
depending on the fibre orientation distribution, or as an input
for constitutive models, such as the ones presented in [29,
30], or for quality testing by construction companies.
Furthermore, the new analysis method revealed that the
hooked-ends of fibres should contribute to the mechanical
3773
properties of steel fibre reinforced cementitious composites
(SFRCCs) (at least) in the uncracked state; this is a result
that cannot be obtained by use of the other methods.
Mechanical models for short fibre reinforced composites
like [29–31] often only consider the main fibre orientation,
a discussion of how to include the contribution of the
hooked-ends into these models or about an alternative
description will also be presented here. The influence
factors can probably be separated as follows:
– matrix strength (influenced by concrete recipe and
porosity),
– fibre–matrix bond (influenced by porosity, concrete
recipe and fibre surface),
– fibre strength (influenced by fibre material and geometry),
– local fibre amount (influenced by rheology/flow/vibra-
tion) and
– local fibre orientations (influenced by rheology/flow/
vibration).
All factors together determine the strength of the composite
and can be independent of each other. It is clear that the
fibre orientation distribution is only one of the many fac-
tors; however, it seems to be the one that is overlooked by
many researchers and practitioners. It is important to sep-
arate the different factors, changing only one while keeping
the others constant. Here the focus is on the fibre
orientations.
Hessian matrix-based analysis methods
The software for the analysis is split into two parts; the first
one performs the preparation for the analysis, including a
possible filtering (see ‘‘Filtering’’ section). The main step
is to binarise the data into foreground (fibres) and back-
ground (the rest), and to branch the data into two different
processes. In one of them, a recursive smoothing through a
Gaussian filter is applied on the binary data-set, in order to
prepare it for the analysis. On the other branch, a ‘Binary
Image to Shape Labels map’ [32, 33] is applied on the data,
in order to isolate and label accordingly all the voxel ele-
ments belonging to isolated regions in space (single fibres
or groups of touching fibres). Each label univocally rep-
resents voxels belonging to an independent region. Each
group of touching fibres or individual fibre will have
therefore all of their voxels labelled with the same label.
The algorithms are implemented in C?? using self-im-
plemented functions and the Insight Segmentation and
Registration Toolkit library (ITK) [24].
Branch 1: itk::SmoothingRecursiveGaussianImageFilter
save to file for analysis
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3774 J Mater Sci (2016) 51:3772–3783

Branch 2: itk::BinaryImageToShapeLabelMapFilter
save binary labels mask to file
The main software component takes both data-sets as
input and performs its analysis on the smoothed fibres,
using the label mask to preserve only the voxels belonging
to the real fibres and storing them according to the regions
they belong to. It also helps filtering out values generated
by the Gaussian smoothing that will only be used as
neighbours in the calculations of real fibre voxels.
For each voxel of the fibre data-set, a Hessian matrix of
the grey values is built, i.e. the matrix of second-order
partial derivatives of the grey values. Given a voxel with
indices x, y, z, the analysis will use the voxels with indices
ranging from x  2; y  2; z  2 to x þ 2; y þ 2; z þ 2 to
compute the second derivatives, see Fig. 1. This represents
therefore the variation on the grey scales in the region
around the voxel.
The eigenvalues extracted from the Hessian matrix
describe the strength of the grey-scale variation in all
directions for the voxel of interest. By selecting the eigen-
vector corresponding to the smallest eigenvalue (by absolute
value), the algorithm returns the direction along which there
is the smallest variation in grey-scale values, describing
therefore the direction of the fibre itself in the specific voxel
(the variation is strongly perpendicular to the main axis of
the fibre, and smaller along the fibre direction itself).
In short, the algorithm can be described by the following
pseudo-code:
load volume
σ ← radius of fibre
apply Gauss filter
for all voxel do
calculate Hesse matrix
find eigenvector of smallest (according to absolute
value) eigenvalue of Hesse matrix
end for
After these first steps of the analysis, there are three
possibilities to proceed:
1. calculate the orientation tensor (Eq. 1) for all fibres
together (out of all local vectors), this will further be
called hes-vox;
2. find the maximum of the orientation distribution
function of vector directions per fibre, see Fig. 2, to
receive orientation of each individual fibre, this will
further be called hes-fib;
3. calculate the orientation tensor per fibre, then deter-
mine eigenvectors and eigenvalues, of which the main
eigenvector determines the orientation of each indi-
vidual fibre.
The orientation tensor is the sum of the outer products of
the orientation vectors of each voxel (or each fibre), see
also ‘‘Local contribution of fibres’’ section:
X
A¼ vðiÞ  vðiÞ ; ð1Þ
i
where vðiÞ is the i-th vector. The orientation distribution
function (ODF) is a spherical distribution function on a unit
sphere, describing the probability of finding a vector of a
given orientation.
The first possibility (i.e. the hes-vox approach) will
result in the maximal mechanical contribution of the fibres
before the bond between matrix and fibres starts to break.
In the case of hooked-end fibres, the hooks should con-
tribute to the mechanical strength in the transverse direc-
tion. This is a feature which has so far not been taken into
account in the mechanical theories of SFRC.
The second possibility (i.e. the hes-fib approach) first
finds the main orientation of each individual fibre and is
therefore comparable to the skeletonisation- and linear
regression-based approaches. This method assumes that the
fibres only act along their main axis, it therefore neglects
the contribution of the hooks. However, after the debond-
ing the fibres act only along their main axis, this is also true
for crack-bridging, where only the main orientation is
relevant. This method therefore gives the contribution of
the fibres after the debonding started.

60

50

40
amount

30

20

10

00

20 0
50
40 100
150
60 200
ϑ 250
80 ϕ
300
350
100400

Fig. 1 Neighbouring pixels to compute the Hessian matrix to Fig. 2 Orientation peaks for three touching fibres; the tails created by
determine the orientation of a fibre; presented is a 2D example for the curvature in the hooks connecting to the small peak of the
easier visualisation diagonal hook-part are visible

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J Mater Sci (2016) 51:3772–3783
Fig. 3 Voxel orientation vectors and main fibre orientation vectors
for three touching fibres
The third approach (i.e. the hes-ten approach) is com-
parable to the hes-fib from the mechanical point of view.
The difference is in the way how the main orientation per
fibre is computed.
The hes-fib and hes-ten approaches require to separate
touching fibres, which might not be possible within the fil-
tering process. For the hes-fib approach, the idea is to use the
orientation distribution of the local orientation vectors, find
maxima and identify the voxels that belong to each maximum.
These form the main part of an individual fibre. Further
information is given by the smaller peaks of the hooks and the
tail that connects the hooks with the main peak. Figures 2 and
3 show the orientation distribution and extracted fibre orien-
tation vectors for three touching fibres, respectively.
The initial steps of the analysis algorithm development
were performed on an artificial data-set of a single fibre
constructed very similar to a real one. Length, thickness
and shape were reproduced artificially before performing a
Gaussian smoothing on the fibre, as it would have then
happened for the real data.
The data-set was used to develop on a sandbox-like,
noise-free environment that allowed to validate numeri-
cally and visually the correctness of the method used.
Local contribution of fibres
Once the vectors are extracted for each voxel, by con-
structing the outer product (also called tensor or dyadic
product) of the vector with itself and averaging them, it is
possible to obtain the orientation tensor taking into account
the full contribution of the fibres, including their hooked
components.
Again the algorithm is presented in pseudo-code:
for all voxel-vectors do
calculate orientation tensor (vector ⊗ vector)
end for
sum all the orientation tensors
divide the sum of orientation tensors by the number
of voxels
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Main fibre direction contribution
Additional steps in the analysis have to be taken in order
to separate touching fibres and obtaining for each of
them its own orientation vector or tensor. The label
mask produced during the filtering phase allows to
identify the region to which each voxel (and therefore
the voxel orientation vector calculated in the previous
step) belongs.
A region, as previously stated, is composed of all the
voxels in a number of fibres, touching each other in one or
more contact points, but without any connection with the
rest of the fibres of the data-set. In a few lucky cases, a
region consists of a single fibre that has no contact with any
other, but in most cases it is composed of two or more
fibres (complete or partially cut).
In order to separate them and obtain a unique orien-
tation vector for each fibre, it is first necessary to convert
all the voxel vectors extracted before from Cartesian
coordinates to spherical coordinates, where h is the
inclination angle with respect to the z-axis and u is the
in-plane angle within the x–y-plane, with u ¼ 0 in the x-
direction. The values are approximated to a precision of
one degree. Once the conversion is done, a matrix of size
90  360 is built. The two spherical angles, theta and phi,
are used as indices to access the matrix. The value of
each cell represents the number of vectors whose angles
correspond to the values of theta and phi used to access
that given cell. In an additional matrix for each cell, the
average of the three-dimensional positions in space of the
vectors is stored.
The theta–phi matrix is first smoothed through
Gaussian filtering to produce smooth single peaks and
then processed to isolate the features of interest. In a
given region, a peak of values will represent a very high
number (proportional to the size of the region) of vectors
oriented in the same direction. Such a high peak repre-
sents the vectors composing the main shaft of a fibre,
describing therefore its orientation. To separate them,
the theta–phi matrix is processed through a connected
component labelling approach that isolates separate
clusters of values, based on a minimum value threshold
(see Fig. 4).
Inside each of these separate clusters, a standard
approach peak detection is applied (based on the analysis
of the second-order derivatives of the function) to obtain
the specific theta and phi values of the highest peak.
At the end of the region analysis, the spherical angles
are converted back to Cartesian coordinates, and saved
together with the three coordinates describing the centre
position of the single fibre in space.
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100 80 100 80
120 60 120 60

140 40 140 40

160 20 160 20

180 0 20 40 60 80 100 0 180 0 20 40 60 80 100 0

200 340 200 340

220 320 220 320

240 300 240 300

260 280 260 280

Fig. 4 Clustered regions isolated for peak detection
The algorithm is summarised as follows:
initialise empty theta-phi matrix
for all separate region do
for all voxel vector in region do
convert to spherical coordinates theta,phi
increment by 1 the value of matrix[theta][phi]
end for
perform Gaussian smoothing of theta-phi matrix
perform connected component labelling to isolate
clusters
for all cluster do
find highest peak
convert theta and phi to Cartesian coordinates
return orientation vector and position of highest
peak
calculate orientation tensor (vector ⊗ vector)
end for
end for
sum all the orientation tensors
divide the sum of orientation tensors by the number
of fibres
Main fibre orientation by per-fibre eigenvectors
A test on a single fibre region proved that it is possible to
determine the main orientation of a single fibre by calcu-
lating the orientation tensor of the voxel vectors of this
region and then extract the eigenvectors. The first eigen-
vector points in the direction of the fibre, Fig. 5. The main
fibre orientation from the eigenvector analysis for the fibre
presented in Fig. 5 is h ¼ 83:34 , u ¼ 312:15 , and from
the peak analysis it is h ¼ 83 , u ¼ 313 (and h ¼ 89 ,
u ¼ 130 ). In rare cases with the peak close to h ¼ 90 , the
peak detection algorithm detected two peaks, the original
and a mirror peak at u þ 180 . This is because each voxel
vector produces two points on the unit sphere (mirrored
with respect to the origin), and only the upper half of the
sphere is analysed; this could be solved by analysing the
whole sphere and using a uniform discretisation, which is
planned for the future. This problem is not encountered in
the alignment tensor and eigenvector approach.
The flow of the analysis algorithm is visualised in Fig. 6.
(a) original coordinates (b) transformed coordinates
Fig. 5 Scatter plot of the voxel vector orientations of a single fibre;
radius is inclination angle h in degrees, circumference is angle u.
Main fibre orientation is marked by the line. The high-density area at
u ¼ 130 is the second part of the peak in (a) at u ¼ 315 and the
second hook, as verified by the transformed coordinates in (b) (polar
coordinates with y-axis as polar axis)
Application to real samples and comparison
Samples and scanning procedure
The samples used in this study were a subset of those used
in [20]: cores of 10 cm in diameter and 25 cm in height,
drilled either from the centre part or near the edge of large
SFRC floor slabs ðH  W  L: 25 cm  100 cm  500 cmÞ.
The self-compacting concrete (class C30/37) was rein-
forced with 50 mm-long and /1 mm-wide hooked-end rod
wire fibres (C4D or C7D steel according to standard EN
10016-2). The length of the hooks was approx. 6 mm, with
bending angles between 30 and 45 . The fibre content was
80 kg m3 , resulting in approximately 250 fibres per dm3 .
The scan protocol was the same: a Nanotom 180 NF X-
ray microtomography system (PhoenixjX-ray Systems and
Services, now part of GE Measurement and Control
Solutions, Wunstorf, Germany) was used, utilising 160 kV
acceleration voltage, 55–70 lA X-ray tube current and a
4 mm copper filter to reduce beam hardening effects. The
2304  2304 pixel detector was used in 4  4 binning
mode and moved sideways during the scan to virtually
double the detector size. The projection images were
obtained as an average of 8–10 1-s exposures of the
detector. The angular step size was 1 . The scan geometry
resulted in an effective pixel size (corresponding to the
voxel size of the reconstructed volume) of 128.3 lm. The
time needed to scan one volume was about 2.5 h. The
scanned section of the samples was approximately 7 cm
high.
Tomographic reconstruction was performed with the
FDK-algorithm-based [34] Datosjx-reconstruction software
by PhoenixjX-ray, with additional beam hardening cor-
rection applied. However, as can be seen in Fig. 7 this did
not completely solve the problem.

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J Mater Sci (2016) 51:3772–3783
Fig. 6 Flowchart of the analysis
While the scanned volume seems to be quite small
compared to the fibre length, the amount of fibres is large
enough with theoretically over 140 fibres to allow statistics.
On the other hand, it has been shown (see Fig. 3.4 in [35])
that systematic variations of the fibre orientations can
appear on short scales, as short as around 10 cm. As a
consequence of this, the scanned volume has a good size,
allowing statistics without risking systematic changes
within the analysed volume.
Fig. 7 An SFRC tomography image seen from top with different
thresholds, and the ‘‘cupping effect’’ (beam hardening) is visible: a all
fibres visible, but lots of noise; b noise level reduced; c noise almost
3777
Noisy data and filtering
A few preliminary considerations are necessary with regard
to the scanned material and scanner to explain several of the
problems encountered and the solutions adopted to solve
them. First, the concrete matrix in which the fibres are
immersed is not homogeneous. It consists of cement, gravel
(often granite) and (unwanted) air bubbles. This means that a
wide range of density values are encountered in the scan
analysis instead of the ideal binary classification (fibre/not
fibre). Additionally, the distribution and alignment of the
fibres varies significantly inside the concrete, leading
therefore to contacts among the fibres, from a simple 1-point
contact, to more extreme cases in which two fibres are in
contact with each other for all or most of their length. Further
the concrete matrix is a highly absorbing material for X-ray,
which requires either high beam power or small samples.
The second factor, the scanning system and method, has also
been the source of unwanted effects. Due to the low intensity
of the X-ray generated by the scanner and the reconstruction
process, several errors are indeed introduced in the produced
data. These are described in detail in [20]. To summarise, a
cylindrical artefact caused by photon starvation and the use
of two detector positions (Fig. 8), and a high level of noise
remained in the data-set. While these problems can, for a
given sample, be greatly reduced using a more powerful
scanner, the scanner also creates the temptation to use larger
samples, which would increase the noise level again.
Additionally, the method of obtaining the sample, i.e.
drilling the concrete cylinder out of a larger SFRC slab, has
the fundamental drawback that several fibres are cut in the
process of drilling and only a part of them remains in the
sample. On the other hand, this sampling method, com-
pared to the casting of the SFRC directly in the cylinder
shape, has the strong advantage of representing a realistic
fibre alignment and positioning in the concrete slab.
Filtering
The projection radiographs were first filtered with a 55 median
filter implemented in ImageJ [36]) prior to reconstruction.
removed, but many fibres are lost; and d the Frangi filter removed the
noise and solved the cupping problem
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Fig. 8 Cylindrical central artefacts produced by the scanning process: a side view and b top view of the reconstruction, and c original
transmission image; the ‘‘shadow’’ is a result of shifting the detector positions and the main source of the artefacts

In contrast to the ‘highEdge’ filtering used in [20], other – itk::MedianImageFilter,

measures are necessary for the algorithm described in – itk::BinaryThresholdImageFilter and
‘‘Hessian matrix based analysis methods’’. – itk::OpeningByReconstructionImageFilter.
A series of initial attempts at processing the data without These are also summarised in Fig. 9.
a massive filtering process failed for the reasons mentioned
above. After testing several libraries, the choice fell on the
Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK).
Thanks to the large number of features, despite having
been created mainly for medical image analysis, the library
was the best choice in terms of power and ease of use. The
first and most important step that the data-set undergoes
during the filtering process is the vesselness enhancement
filtering (or Frangi filtering) [37, 38]. The Frangi filter is
made to extract the tubular shapes of vessels from a noisy
data-set through the use of the second-order local structure
of an image (Hessian matrix), and the steel fibres of the
SFRC are indeed tubular shaped. By enhancing them, a
double result is archived: most of the noise belonging to the
concrete matrix is removed and simultaneously the beam
hardening effect is removed. The tubular shapes are indeed
enhanced to an equal level independently from their dis-
tance from the edge of the data-set, Fig. 7d. After the
Frangi filter, however, the data-set is not yet completely
free from noise, so it undergoes an additional phase of
filtering. First, a common median filter is applied to it and
then, with most of the noise already filtered out, the data
are turned into binary through a fixed thresholding. Some
residual very small noise elements still remain in the binary
data-set. The next filter is an opening by reconstruction
[39]: by employing a spherical structuring element whose
diameter is slightly smaller than the cross section of the
fibres, this removes from the data-set the background noise
which cannot contain the sphere. The fibres are left com-
pletely untouched by the process.
The main steps in the filtering are as follows:
– Load original data-set,
– itk::HessianRecursiveGaussianImageFilter,
– itk::Hessian3DToVesselnessMeasureImageFilter, Fig. 9 Flowchart of the filtering

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100 80 100 80 100 80 100 80

120 60 120 60 120 60 120 60

140 40 140 40 140 40 140 40

160 20 160 20 160 20 160 20

180 0 20 40 60 80 100 0 180 0 20 40 60 80 100 0 180 0 20 40 60 80 100 0 180 0 20 40 60 80 100 0

200 340 200 340 200 340 200 340

220 320 220 320 220 320 220 320

240 300 240 300 240 300 240 300

260 280 260 280 260 280 260 280

(a) (b) (c) (d)

Fig. 10 Scatter plot of fibre orientations (green triangles skeleton, axis (from bottom to top of cylinder). The lines show the eigenvectors
black circles Hessian); radius is inclination angle h in degrees, of the existing distributions (solid Hessian, dashed skeletonization;
circumference is in-plane angle u in degrees. A view antiparallel to z- red d1 , blue d2 , green d3 ) (Color figure online)

A CT scanner with higher beam power, larger detector where nðiÞ is the orientation of the i-th fibre and ki are the
(no shift necessary) and more sensitive/larger pixels (no sorted eigenvalues of O (jk1 j  jk2 j  jk3 j). The order
binning required) would reduce the scanning time and also parameter S 2 ½0:5; 1 can also be calculated as
improve the image quality, which would result in a faster  
3 2 1
analysis. Another possibility to enhance the image quality S¼ cos a  ; ð5Þ
could be to use phase contrast techniques, like [19]. On the 2 2
other hand, phase contrast methods may enhance matrix– where a is the angle between the fibres and the eigenvector
aggregate interfaces and air bubbles and therefore intro- vk1 . A value of S ¼ 1 corresponds to well-aligned fibres,
duce an additional kind of noise. S ¼ 0 to isotropically oriented fibres and S ¼ 0:5 to a
case where all fibres are aligned in a plane. A vanishing
Comparison biaxiality (bS ¼ 0) shows a distribution that is rotation
symmetric around vk1 .
The new algorithm is compared with the previous analysis The often used orientation number g with respect to a
presented in [20]. This method is based on a dual threshold predefined direction, or three orientation numbers with
binarisation and segmentation followed by skeletonisation respect to the coordinate axes
performed in Avizo and Matlab. The statistical analysis in
both cases is performed in the statistical software GNU R gk ¼ hcos bk i; k ¼ x; y; z ð6Þ
[40] (a free implementation of the S language), using provide less information than the order parameter, as they
specialised software [41–45]. As can be seen from Fig. 10 do not contain information about the dispersion.
and Tables 1, 2 and 3, the new algorithm performs well The number of fibre objects, meaning that objects
with respect to reproducing the results. The results from the have at least 25 % of the fibre length (respectively
new algorithm are in general very similar to the previous amount of voxels) is larger than the theoretically
analysis; however, both versions of the new procedure expected value of 143 fibres. The reason is that many
produce slightly different results. The differences and their fibres are cut during the extraction of the samples from
origin will be discussed below. the slabs, resulting in more pieces than one would
The main tendencies of the fibre orientation distributions expect whole fibres. The volume fraction is slightly
can be given by use of the second-order orientation tensor smaller than the expected 1 %, because objects of less
O, its eigenvectors and eigenvalues or the corresponding than 25 % fibre length have been omitted from the
order parameter S and (signed) biaxiality bS ¼ signðSÞb analysis, as they could represent noise, or give a wrong
 
(with b 2 0; 13 jSj ), which are given as follows: orientation. Objects smaller than this size basically
consist only of the hook, or even only of a part of it,
1XN
O¼ nðiÞ  nðiÞ ð2Þ therefore not giving reliable orientation results. The
N i
difference in the orientation of the eigenvectors is
3 around a few degrees, seldom up to 15 degrees.
S ¼ k1 ð3Þ The orientation numbers are generally similar for all
2
1 three analysis methods and differ only in the second
bS ¼ ðk3  k2 Þ; ð4Þ decimal.
2

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Table 1 Summary of properties

Skeletonization Hessian fibre Hessian voxel
of the samples; all samples have
been at least 6 months old at the Sample # fibres % vol S bS # fibres S bS % vol S bS
time of scanning Theoretical 143 1.0 – – 143 – – 1.0 – –

3A middle 168 0.77 0.52 0.12 188 0.57 0.10 0.66 0.54 0.09
4B middle 186 0.84 0.62 0.09 219 0.59 0.09 1.01 0.49 0.08
5B middle 198 0.92 -0.39 0.06 201 -0.41 0.09 0.91 -0.32 0.04
6A middle 138 0.70 0.65 0.03 166 0.61 0.05 0.87 0.56 0.02
The ‘‘# fibres’’ means parts of fibres longer than 25 % fibre length; the expected number of whole fibres
from the real volume fraction would be 143. In the Hessian cases, the ‘‘% vol’’ are calculated from the
voxel anaylsis and would be equal for both cases, the ‘‘# fibres’’ make only sense in a per-fibre analysis

Table 2 Comparison of the eigenvectors di ¼ ðU; HÞ calculated from different analysis methods; the normalized eigenvectors are presented in
spherical coordinates with angles in degrees
Skeletonization Hessian fibre Hessian voxel
Sample d1 d2 d3 d1 d2 d3 d1 d2 d3
ðU; HÞ ðU; HÞ ðU; HÞ ðU; HÞ ðU; HÞ ðU; HÞ ðU; HÞ ðU; HÞ ðU; HÞ

3A middle (25;36) (186;56) (282;81) (17;38) (190;53) (283;86) (25;37) (188;54) (284;82)
4B middle (181;79) (295;26) (86;67) (184;82) (294;22) (92;69) (180;78) (295;27) (85;66)
5B middle (280;17) (177;86) (86;73) (279;10) (186;90) (96;80) (278;21) (173;84) (81;70)
6A middle (29;51) (149;59) (264;55) (23;52) (159;48) (273;66) (29;50) (157;54) (271;61)

Table 3 Comparison of the

Skeletonization Hessian fibre Hessian voxel
orientation numbers calculated
from different analysis methods Sample gX gY gZ gX gY gZ gX gY gZ

3A middle 0.44 0.48 0.64 0.49 0.42 0.65 0.47 0.44 0.65
4B middle 0.82 0.34 0.25 0.81 0.36 0.22 0.76 0.38 0.31
5B middle 0.65 0.53 0.25 0.68 0.53 0.19 0.62 0.53 0.31
6A middle 0.59 0.41 0.57 0.62 0.39 0.53 0.58 0.42 0.56

Another important point in comparing the new algo-
rithm with the previously made analysis is the usability and
speed. When it comes to ease of application and speed, the
new algorithm presented here outperforms the other. The
orientation analysis in Avizo took about 3 h, as stated in
[20], a similar timing is given for the linear regression
presented in [21], and the new approaches take less than
30 min and require no user interaction after the parameters
are fixed.
Also relevant for the practical use are the required res-
olutions in comparison with the fibre diameter. In the
samples studied here, the fibre diameter was about eight
voxels (voxel size: 0.128 mm  0.128 mm  0.128 mm;
fibre diameter 1 mm). This resolution delivers reliable
results. A test with a different sample in a different (lower
resolution) CT showed that a fibre diameter of at least four
voxels is needed.
Interpretation of the results and impact
on constitutive modelling
The difference between the Hessian main orientation and
the skeletonisation can be explained by cut fibres, in many
cases the Hessian main orientation will still coincide with
the main fibre axis, while in the case of the skeletonisation
the vector points from one end to the other end of the
skeleton, see Fig. 11.
The difference in the results between using the full
voxel vectors and using the main direction of a fibre is
relevant and can be explained by the hooked-ends of the
fibres used in these samples.
From a theoretical perspective, the hooked-end fibre
could be considered a system of fibres, acting in different
directions. Each segment produces a peak in the orientation
analysis in the direction in which it is working (see Figs. 12

123
J Mater Sci (2016) 51:3772–3783
and 13). That the small peaks for the hook-diagonals are
visible in the orientation analysis is an indicator that
mechanically a contribution could be expected. So far, it
seems that nobody has looked for this contribution. As it is
small, it can potentially be hidden by other effects that
influence the strength.
From this, it follows that the influence of fibres should
be treated differently in the elastic state—here possibly
acting as orthotropic inclusions—and the cracked state,
where the fibres are bridging the cracks and each fibre can
be considered as a (transversely isotropic) rod. To account
for a possible orthotropic influence of a single fibre, the
orientation of the hooked-ends should be analytically
described. Here two possibilities exist: the first one is two
directors for each fibre—one for the main axis and one for
the hook—as used by [46] for biaxial liquid crystals (two-
director theory); the other one is to use unit-quaternions to
describe the orientation of an individual fibre, which leads
to an orientation distribution function defined on a three-
dimensional unit sphere—a hyper-sphere in four-
25% length (100voxels)
(a) (b)
Fig. 11 Comparison of error for orientation of partial fibres:
a skeletonisation and b Hessian analysis; as can be seen, the Hessian
peak analysis retains the main fibre orientation even in the case of
part-fibres
100
80
60
amount
40
20
00
20
40
ϑ
60
250
200
80 300
100400
350
Fig. 12 Orientation peaks for a single fibre region; the large peak
belongs to the main shaft and the small peaks to the diagonals in the
hooks
Fig. 13 A hooked-end fibre decomposed into a system of fibres to
explain the small peaks and the possible mechanical effect of the
hooks
3781
dimensional space—and four-dimensional orientation ten-
sors, as mentioned in [47].
Depending on the strain and strain history, the fibres can
act differently. In the linear-elastic range, the fibres pos-
sibly act as orthotropic inclusions, contributing not only
along the main axis, but also in the direction of the hooked-
ends or the undulations. In the strain-softening material,
during the plastic deformations of the structural element
(cracking and crack localisation), the fibres will act along
their main axis as transversely isotropic inclusions.
The fibre orientation distributions obtained by the
analysis methods can, for example, be used in the two
constitutive models proposed in [29, 30] and [48]. The first
model is based on an orthotropic material using orientation
averaging to determine the coefficients, and the second
model is based on the direct use of the orientation tensor.
Conclusion
The results of the application of the new Hessian matrix-
based algorithm to obtain fibre orientations show that it is
necessary to consider the shape of fibres more accurately
when formulating constitutive equations for fibre rein-
forced materials. Most steel fibres used in civil engineering
today, like hooked-end or undulating shapes, should act
orthotopically. This means that their strongest contribution
to the material response in the uncracked state is along
their main axis, but they also contribute in the direction of
the longer minor axis. The latter contribution in the
uncracked state has so far not been considered at all. The
Hessian matrix-based algorithm presented here is capable
of delivering both, the full contribution of a fibre and its
major axis. The performance of the algorithm is at least an
order of magnitude better than other approaches presented
in the literature, and less user input as well as less user
skills are necessary.
Acknowledgements This study was compiled with the assistance of
the Tiger University Program of the Estonian Information Technology
0
Foundation (VisPar system, EITSA/HITSA Tiigriülikool Grants
50
150
100 10-03-00-24, 12-03-00-11, 13030009 and travel Grants to present at
VARE 2013 for E.P. and at SalentoAVR 2014 for H.H.). This
ϕ
research was supported by the European Union through the European
Regional Development Fund, in particular through funding for the
‘‘Centre for Nonlinear Studies’’ as an Estonian national centre of
excellence. This research was supported by the European Social
Fund’s Doctoral Studies and Internationalisation Program DoRa T4
and the Doctoral School in Information and Communication Tech-
nology, which are carried out by Archimedes Foundation (scholarship
for E.P.).
Author contributions All authors contributed to the research and
this article. In particular, HH designed the new algorithm and per-
formed statistics, EP implemented the algorithm and filtering, JS and
AK performed the tomography scanning and volume reconstruction.
123
3782
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