Contour fractal analysis of grains

Fractal analysis has been shown to be useful in image processing to characterise the shape and the grey-scale complexity in different applications spanning from electronic to medical engineering (e.g. [1]). Fractal analysis consists of several methods to assign a dimension and other fractal characteristics to a dataset describing geometric objects. Limited studies have been conducted on the application of fractal analysis to the classification of the shape characteristics of soil grains. The main objective of the work described in this paper is to obtain, from the results of systematic fractal analysis of artificial simple shapes, the characterization of the particle morphology at different scales. The long term objective of the research is to link the microscopic features of granular media with the mechanical behaviour observed in the laboratory and in situ.