An infrared thermal image processing framework based on superpixel algorithm to detect cracks on metal surface

• A proper superpixel algorithm was selected for infrared thermal image processing.
• Proper texture features of superpixels were selected for clustering.
• A new infrared thermal image processing frame was proposed to detect cracks automatically.
• Experiments were implemented to verify the effectiveness of the image processing frame.

Infrared thermography has been used increasingly as an effective non-destructive technique to detect cracks on metal surface. Due to many factors, infrared thermal image has low definition compared to visible image. The contrasts between cracks and sound areas in different thermal image frames of a specimen vary greatly with the recorded time. An accurate detection can only be obtained by glancing over the whole thermal video, which is a laborious work. Moreover, experience of the operator has a great important influence on the accuracy of detection result. In this paper, an infrared thermal image processing framework based on superpixel algorithm is proposed to accomplish crack detection automatically. Two popular superpixel algorithms are compared and one of them is selected to generate superpixels in this application. Combined features of superpixels were selected from both the raw gray level image and the high-pass filtered image. Fuzzy c-means clustering is used to cluster superpixels in order to segment infrared thermal image. Experimental results show that the proposed framework can recognize cracks on metal surface through infrared thermal image automatically.