Fracture recognition in digital imagery

A new procedure to automatically delineate joints and lineations from digital imagery is presented in this paper. The spatial merging procedure is applied to the results of three different edge detectors on a digital aerial image. As a measure of accuracy, the automatically delineated structures, as well as the raw results of the edge detectors are compared to the lineations manually identified on the image. None of the techniques is highly successful in delineating joints and lineations on its own. Spatial merging, however, has the potential for becoming a useful automated technique in the future.