Morphologic segmentation algorithms for extracting individual surface features from areal surface topography maps

Areal segmentation, i.e. the partitioning of areal surface topography data into regions, has recently attracted significant research interest in surface metrology. In particular morphologic segmentation, i.e. partitioning into Maxwellian hills and dales - currently the only segmentation approach endorsed by ISO specification standards - has shown potential for capturing the salient traits of a surface, so that its surface texture can be better encoded by parameters. However, recent developments in dimensional metrology applied to structured surfaces with features of dimensions on the order of micrometres (micro-electromechanical system, microfluidics, etc), and many other studies aimed at characterizing individual features in unstructured surfaces (scratches, bumps, holes, etc), are showing the importance of segmentation for extracting localized features from areal data. In this work, morphologic segmentation is applied to a selected set of case studies of industrial relevance, involving structured, semi-structured and unstructured surfaces, where the main goal is not the assessment of surface texture, but the extraction of individual surface features. The examples are designed to provide an overview of the main advantages and issues when applying morphologic segmentation in a comprehensive set of application scenarios.