Matching of crushed highly decomposed granite particles using 3D SHOT descriptors

Owing to the complex morphology and the fragility of highly decomposed granite (HDG), it is still a challenge to track the breakage process of HDG particles within a deformed sample in geomechanics research. An HDG particle matching method is proposed in this paper for the first time to track and match HDG fragments with their mother particles from which they break off. First, the X-ray micro-computed tomography (μCT) images of HDG particles were acquired from a one-dimensional compression test and a certain number of HDG particles and fragments were selected and reconstructed. Second, the original and fracture surfaces of the fragments were identified and segmented. Then, the essential morphological features of the particles and fragments were represented with the key points. The neighbourhood information around the key points was encoded by the three-dimensional (3D) feature descriptor. Next, the mismatches were filtered out by the random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm based on the similarity of the local neighbourhood information. Finally, the influences of several parameters on the matching results were investigated. The capability and efficiency of the HDG particle matching method were demonstrated using the μCT data of ten HDG particles and 32 fragments that resulted from the crushing of these particles.