Automatic identification of different types of welding defects in radiographic images

Radiographic testing is a well-established non-destructive testing method to detect subsurface welding defects. In this paper, an automatic computer-aided identification system was implemented to recognize different types of welding defects in radiographic images. Imageprocessing techniques such as background subtraction and histogram thresholding were implemented to separate defects from the background. Twelve numeric features were extracted to represent each defect instance. The extracted feature values are subsequently used to classify welding flaws into different types by using two well-known classifiers: fuzzy k-nearest neighbor and multi-layer perceptron neural networks classifiers. Their performances are tested and compared using the bootstrap method. q 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.