Dynamic Line-Scan Thermography for the Inspection of Paper-Based Materials: A Case Study Focused on an Ancient Book Cover

This work is focused on the use of line-scan thermography (LST) method for the inspection of an ancient book cover. Three widely used image post-processing techniques (i.e., pulsed phase thermography, partial least square thermography and principal component thermography) were applied to the acquired thermal sequences. Flash thermography (FT) anticipated the LST results in order to have a comparison of the results. It was concluded that LST is an effective technique for paper-based materials, and it can additionally provide a higher image contrast if compared to classical FT technique.

Reconstruction of Simulated Cylindrical Defects in Acrylic Glass Plate Using Pulsed Phase Thermography

The results of testing of acrylic glass, in which cylindrical defects were simulated at different depths by applying Pulsed Phase Thermography, are presented in the paper. To ensure better visibility of the simulated defects, suitable thermal images were selected and then processed by using two different procedures. In the first procedure, reduced thermal image sequences were generated by uniform extraction from the basic sequence, to enable analysis at different sampling frequencies. The second procedure was based on the application of a window function, which ensured that only uniformly selected thermal images took part in the evaluation of the basic sequence. The remaining thermal images were not used, but they did participate in the determination of the length of the analyzed sequence; in other words, their existence was registered through the number of samples used in Fast Fourier Transformation. The second procedure yielded much better results with regard to the estimation of the shape of a defect and the depth at which it was located. To provide better insight into the development of the thermal process in the defect area, an additional analysis of pixel intensity variation in the time domain was undertaken.

A Quantitative Comparison Among Different Algorithms for Defects Detection on Aluminum with the Pulsed Thermography Technique

Pulsed thermography is commonly used as a non-destructive technique for evaluating defects within materials and components. In the last few years, many algorithms have been developed with the aim to detect defects and different methods have been used for detecting their size and depth. However, only few works in the literature reported a comparison among the different algorithms in terms of the number of detected defects, the time spent in testing and analysis, and the quantitative evaluation of size and depth. In this work, starting from a pulsed thermographic test carried out on an aluminum specimen with twenty flat bottom holes of known nominal size and depth, different algorithms have been used with the aim to obtain a comparison among them in terms of signal to background contrast (SBC) and number of detected defects by analyzing different time intervals. Moreover, the correlation between SBC and the aspect ratio of the defects has been investigated. The algorithms used have been: Pulsed Phase Thermography (PPT), Slope, Correlation Coefficient (R2), Thermal Signal Reconstruction (TSR) and Principal Component Thermography (PCT). The results showed the advantages, disadvantages, and sensitivity of the various thermographic algorithms.