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Effect of Background Subtraction on Defect Detection in Thermographic Signal Reconstruction Coefficient Images

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Abstract

When halogen lamps are used as the excitation source in long pulse thermography (LPT) of composite materials, the non-uniform surface temperature distribution will appear in the thermographic image recorded by the infrared camera and so the performance of the LPT technology will be affected severely. To address this issue, a simple method is proposed in this work to enhance the defect detectability for the LPT technique. In this method, the locations of the pixels in the non-defective area are firstly determined by an empirical rule, and then the thermal data of these non-defective areas is selected for estimating the non-uniform surface temperature distribution by a second order polynomial curve-fitting model. Finally, the thermal image sequences after non-uniform background removal are analyzed using thermographic signal reconstruction coefficients to enhance the quality of thermal images for damage detection further. To assess the performance of the method proposed in this paper, the defect detection experiment for the carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) using this method is carried out. Experimental results show that this method proposed in this paper can effectively remove the temperature non-uniformity, and it can reveal 11 out of 12 defects on the CFRP sample with a high signal-to-noise ratio of 9.09, where all the defects with aspect ratio ≥ 2.5 can be detected, and 1 illegible defect with aspect ratio of 1.67 can also be detected.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. JZ2019HGTB0082), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51505120).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Instrument Science and Opto-electronics Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, 230009, Anhui, China

    Yuzhong Zhang, Kezun Zhang, Wenjing Wang, Shuangbao Shu, Xianli Lang & Jingjing Chen

  2. Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Measuring Theory and Precision Instrument, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, 230009, Anhui, China

    Yuzhong Zhang, Kezun Zhang, Wenjing Wang, Shuangbao Shu, Xianli Lang & Jingjing Chen

  3. School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Huainan Normal University, Huainan, 232038, Anhui, China

    Yan Zhang

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  1. Yuzhong Zhang
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  4. Shuangbao Shu
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Correspondence to Shuangbao Shu or Yan Zhang.

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Zhang, Y., Zhang, K., Wang, W. et al. Effect of Background Subtraction on Defect Detection in Thermographic Signal Reconstruction Coefficient Images. J Nondestruct Eval 41, 44 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10921-022-00874-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10921-022-00874-1

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