Thermal Imaging-Based Instance Segmentation for Automated Health Monitoring of Steel Ladle Refractory Lining

Abstract: Equipment and machines can be exposed to very high temperatures in the steel mill industry. One particularly critical part is the ladles used to hold and pour molten iron into mouldings. A refractory lining is used as an insulation layer between the outer steel shell and the molten iron to protect the ladle from the hot iron. Over time, or if the lining is not completely cured, the lining wears out or can potentially fail. Such a scenario can lead to a breakout of molten iron, which can cause damage to equipment and, in the worst case, workers. Previous work analyses how critical areas can be identified in a proactive matter. Using thermal imaging, the failing spots on the lining could show as high-temperature areas on the outside steel shell. The idea is that the outside temperature corresponds to the thickness of the insulating lining. The detection of these spots is identified when temperatures over a given threshold are registered within the thermal camera's field of view. The images must then be manually analyzed over time, to follow the progression of a detected spot. The existing solution is also prone to the background noise of other hot objects.  This thesis proposes an initial step to automate monitoring the health of refractory lining in steel ladles. The report will investigate the usage of Instance Segmentation to isolate the ladle from its background. Thus, reducing false alarms and background noise in an autonomous monitoring setup. The model training is based on Mask R-CNN on our own thermal images, with pre-trained weights from visual images. Detection is done on two classes: open or closed ladle. The model proved reasonably successful on a small dataset of 1000 thermal images. Different models were trained with and without augmentation, pre-trained weights as well multi-phase fine-tuning. The highest mAP of 87.5\% was achieved on a pre-trained model with image augmentation without fine-tuning. Though it was not tested in production, temperature readings could lastly be extracted on the segmented ladle, decreasing the risk of false alarms from background noise.