Thermal NDT applying Candid Covariance-Free Incremental Principal Component Thermography (CCIPCT)

Thermal and infrared imagery creates considerable developments in Non-destructive Testing (NDT) area. An analysis for thermal NDT inspection is addressed applying a new technique for computation of eigen-decomposition (factor analysis) similar to Principal Component Thermography(PCT). It is referred as Candid Covariance-Free Incremental Principal Component Thermography (CCIPCT). The proposed approach uses a computational short-cut to estimate covariance matrix and Singular Value Decomposition(SVD) to obtain faster PCT results, but while the dimension of the data increases. The problem of computational cost for high-dimensional thermal image acquisition is also investigated. Three types of specimens (CFRP, plexiglass and aluminum) have been used for comparative benchmarking. Then, a clustering algorithm segments the defect at the surface of the specimens. The results conclusively indicate the promising performance and demonstrated a conrmation for the outlined properties.