Evident Canada, Inc.

Alain Le Duff

Guillaume Painchaud-April

Charles Brillon

Chi-Hang Kwan

Examples of the present subject matter provide techniques for enhancing images taken from non-destructive inspection techniques, such as acoustic inspection. A source 3D data may be acquired representing an object. Rather than displaying the source 3D data, signal processing may be employed to enhance the flaws or defects in the source 3D data. A geometry template of the object may be created using the source 3D data. The source 3D data may be compared to the geometry template, and based on the comparison, an enhanced 3D image may be generated.

3D image enhancement for flaw detection

Examples of the present subject matter provide techniques for compressive sampling of acoustic data. A probe may sample in a compression mode, such that the entire matrix is not sampled at full-time resolution or spatial resolution. Therefore, the initial amount of data captured by the probe is reduced, allowing for lower density hardware (e.g., fewer analog-to-digital conversion channels or related analog front-end hardware) to be used at a lower data rate.

Compressive sensing for full matrix capture

Examples described herein include adding a digital watermark into acoustic data. For example, the digital watermark data can be embedded using a key such that the watermark data is spread across a spectrum of the acoustic data. Thus, the data for the digital watermark may have no or minimal visible impact in the images generated using the marked acoustic data. The digital watermark may provide improved security and privacy. Moreover, the digital watermark may be incorporated into the reconstruction process of images.

Digital watermarking of acoustic data

A phase-based approach can be used for one or more of acquisition, storage, or subsequent analysis, e.g., A-scan reconstruction or Total Focusing Method imaging, in support of acoustic inspection. For example, binarization or other quantization technique can be used to compress a data volume associated with time-series signal acquisition. A representation of phase information from the time-series signal can be generated, such as by processing the binarized or otherwise quantized time-series signal. Using the representation of the phase information, a phase summation technique can be used to perform one or more of A-scan reconstruction, such as for pulse-echo A-scan inspection, or a TFM imaging technique can be used, as illustrative examples. In such a phase summation approach, time-series representations of phase data can be summed, such as where each time-series can be delayed (or phase rotated) by an appropriate delay value and then aggregated.

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Alain Le Duff