Composites are prone to defects during the manufacturing process and need to be assessed for their safety by non-destructive testing (NDT) techniques. Infrared thermography (IRT), with its advantages of low cost and easy setup, has become one of the popular techniques for NDT of composite materials. However, multiple thermal images acquired by IRT in a single test often contain ambient noise and an inhomogeneous heating background. Therefore, it is difficult to directly visualize defects in thermograms with the naked eyes. In this work, a guided filtered-slow feature thermography (GF-SFT) method for nondestructive evaluation of composite defects is proposed. Firstly, a guided filter algorithm is used to smooth thermal images for noise reduction. Then the filtered thermal image time series is subjected to slow feature analysis in order to extract the slowest change in time (the features that are unchanged or slowly changing in the time series data), so as to identify defects. The feasibility and effectiveness of the GF-SFT method are validated by test results on a carbon fiber-reinforced polymer.
CHANGHaoliang, YANGMing, ZHUXinyu, et al. Infrared imaging nondestructive testing technology for general aircraft composites[J]. Journal of Terahertz Science and Electronic Information Technology, 2024, 22(7): 768-775. (in Chinese)
LITiejun, WANGJinglu. Detection method of internal holes in plate based on active infrared thermal excitation[J]. Information Technology and Informatization, 2024(5): 93-96. (in Chinese)
[5]
IBARRA-CASTANEDOC, TARPANIJ R, MALDAGUEX P V. Nondestructive testing with thermography[J]. European Journal of Physics, 2013, 34(6): S91-S109.
[6]
BHABATOSHC. Digital image processing and analysis[M]. New Delhi: PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd., 2011.
CHAKRABORTYA. A comparative study of mean square error, dimensions, signal to noise ratio of colored and non colored clustered original images along with compresses version after the image segmentation and filtering method[J]. Indian Journal of Computer Science and Technology, 2024, 3(3): 1-6.
[9]
HEK, SUNJ, TANGX. Guided image filtering[J]. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2013, 35(6): 1397-1409.
[10]
FARBMANZ, FATTALR, LISCHINSKID, et al. Edge-preserving decompositions for multi-scale tone and detail manipulation[J]. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 2008, 27(3): 1-10.
[11]
ZHANGM, GUNTURKB K. Multiresolution bilateral filtering for image denoising[J]. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2008, 17(12): 2324-2333.
[12]
RAJICN. Principal component thermography for flaw contrast enhancement and flaw depth characterisation in composite structures[J]. Composite Structures, 2002, 58(4): 521-528.
[13]
LIUY, WUJ Y, LIUK, et al. Independent component thermography for non-destructive testing of defects in polymer composites[J]. Measurement Science and Technology, 2019, 30(4): 044006.
[14]
QUZ, JIANGP, ZHANGW. Development and application of infrared thermography non-destructive testing techniques[J]. Sensors, 2020, 20(14): 3851.
[15]
WISKOTTL, SEJNOWSKIT J. Slow feature analysis: unsupervised learning of invariances[J]. Neural Computation, 2002, 14(4): 715-770.
[16]
SONGP, ZHAOC. Slow down to go better: a survey on slow feature analysis[J]. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 2024, 35(3): 3416-3436.
LIUYing, ZHANGJilong. Infrared nondestructive testing technology in materlals and progress[J]. Journal of Test and Measurement Technology, 2001, 15(4): 275-279. (in Chinese)
[21]
ZHUJ, MAOZ, WUD, et al. Progress and trends in non-destructive testing for thermal barrier coatings based on infrared thermography: a review[J]. Journal of Nondestructive Evaluation, 2022, 41(3): 49.
QINXiaoyan, YUANGuanglin, XUEMogen. Infrared small object detection via sparse representation assisted by ridge regression[J]. Opto-Electronic Engineering, 2014, 41(2): 81-87. (in Chinese)
[24]
KATKOVNIKV, FOI A, EGIAZARIANK, et al. From local kernel to nonlocal multiple-model image denoising[J]. International Journal of Computer Vision, 2010, 86(1): 1-32.
[25]
YOUSEFIB, SFARRAS, IBARRA CASTANEDOC, et al. Comparative analysis on thermal non-destructive testing imagery applying candid covariance-free incremental principal component thermography (CCIPCT)[J]. Infrared Physics & Technology, 2017, 85: 163-169.
[26]
ZHENGK, CHANGY S, YAOY. Defect detection in CFRP structures using pulsed thermographic data enhanced by penalized least squares methods[J]. Composites Part B: Engineering, 2015, 79: 351-358.