3D Topography Measurement and Completion Method of Blast Furnace Burden Surface Using High-Temperature Industrial Endoscope

Accurate and real-time 3D burden surface topography of a blast furnace plays an important role in improving the gas flow distribution and optimizing the charging operation, and therefore has great potential to reduce both its CO2 emissions and energy consumption. However, because of the high-temperature, dusty and dark environment inside the furnace, as well as limitations in terms of installation position and viewing angle of the image capturing equipment, it is difficult to obtain clear, continuous and complete images of the burden surface and reconstruct accurate 3D topography in real time. To overcome these limitations, a novel 3D topography measurement and completion method of the burden surface is proposed in this study. First, a high-temperature industrial endoscope is designed and installed to capture the burden surface images during the blast furnace ironmaking process. Then, the details of the burden surface images are enhanced using image sharpening methods and the regions of interest of the images are extracted based on texture energy features. Next, a method based on the depth from defocus is used to calculate the depth of burden surface. Finally, considering that most of the images are incomplete because of the limitations above, a new 3D completion model is established to complete the burden surface topography based on a variational auto encoder and a generative adversarial network. On-site experiments and their validation demonstrate that the proposed method can obtain complete and accurate 3D burden surface topography and provide highly reliable topography data to optimize blast furnace operations.