Automated defect detection algorithm applied to shearography in composites

The aeronautic industry makes now largely use of composite material in its products. Therefore huge efforts have to be done on their experimental validation of these materials. More specifically these composite materials introduce new type of defects (such as delamination, glue defects...) which need to be detected during the manufacturing and maintenance to prevent failures. Moreover the widespread use of these materials imposes to the future detection instruments to be cheap, robust and easy to manipulate by non-specialists. Shearography is an emerging technique for the detection of defects in the composite material [1,2]. It is cheap, and relatively robust and flexible, but requires special qualification to interpret the defect signatures in the interference pattern. Therefore efforts need to be carried out to ease the interpretation of shearographic results for non-specialist of the technique [3]. More specifically, we are looking for techniques to automatically identify defects with shearography by the development of specific algorithms.