Faster R-CNN-CA and thermophysical properties of materials: An ancient marquetry inspection based on infrared and terahertz techniques

The demand for non-invasive inspection (NII) is ever-increasing in the field of cultural heritage conservation. NII is a two-step procedure, first of data acquisition and second of defect detection. Stand-alone imaging techniques such as infrared thermography (IRT) are often insufficient for performing a complete remote analysis and diagnosis of historic structures and art pieces that are of very high cultural value. On this point, an emerging optical inspection method, terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS), is herein employed to provide more details of deeper defects. The imaging results from THz-TDS and IRT are compared and analyzed by employing advanced image processing methods. Next, to achieve automatic inspection of the test sample, which is an ancient marquetry, a Faster R-CNN with coordinate attention (Faster R-CNN-CA) is proposed and fitted with data from two different sources. Worth noting is that, in order to populate sufficient data for training, samples are simulated using finite element analysis and finite difference time domain method. The experiments demonstrate that the mean average precision of the Faster R-CNN-CA model improves by 6.09% over the traditional Faster R-CNN model.