Automatic Inspection of Aerospace Welds Using X-Ray Images

The non-destructive testing (NDT) of components is very important to the aerospace industry. Welds in these components may contain porosities and other defects. These reduce the fatigue life of components and may result in catastrophic accidents if they end up in the aircraft. Currently such welds are inspected by humans studying radiographs of the welds. We describe an automatic system for detecting defects in welds, with the aim of creating a triage system to reduce the workload on human inspectors. Given an X-ray image of the aerospace weld, the system locates the weld line, then analyses the region around the line to identify abnormalities. Our results show that the weld can be precisely extracted from X-ray images and the defect detection operation can identify 83% of defects with fewer than 3 false positives per image, and thus may be useful for prompting human inspectors to reduce their workload.

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