Identification of Thermal and Optical Effects for the Detection of Open-Crack in Photothermal Non Destructive Testing.

In this paper, the images provided by a flying-spot camera dedicated to open-crack detection are considered. In this type of active thermography, thermal effect and the optical effects contribute to the elaboration of photothermal images. In this contribution a signal processing method, based on multiple principal component analysis is proposed in order to separately identify both thermal and optical effects from the raw images. The detection performance enhancement is characterized thanks to Receiver Operating Characteristic curves. © 2003 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]