A New Defect Classification Approach Based on the Fusion Matrix of Multi-Eigenvalue

Defect recognition plays an important part in the health monitoring of in-service equipment. Surface defects and sub-surface defects of key components have different effects on the safety of the equipment. Sub-surface defects are difficult to be identified, and it is more likely to cause unpredictable damage than surface defects. However, the existing characteristic cannot accurately identify the defect type. Therefore, it is critical to find features that are useful for defect classification. The fusion of multiple feature values facilitates defect classification. For obtaining multi-feature fusion eigenvalues, this article introduces a fusion matrix based on Fisher’s discriminant criterion and correlation analysis, which realizes the fusion of two dimensions of the whole and the local and different aspects. The BP neural network classifier is then used to discriminate and classify surface defects and sub-surface defects. The recognition accuracy of surface defects and sub-surface defects can reach 98.1%. The classification accuracy of this approach is significantly improved compared with the method based on a single feature value and other state-of-the-art methods. The approach can also be used to identify defects with different cross-sectional shapes, indicating that this approach is suited for nature defects.