Research on edge identification of a defect using pulsed eddy current based on principal component analysis

It is difficult to identify the edge of a defect in nondestructive testing (NDT), which affects the result of a C-scan image acquired by arrays of pulsed eddy current sensors (APECS). To overcome the problem of low accuracy in identification of the edge of a defect using the conventional eddy current techniques, which only extract features in time domain, features from pulsed eddy current that has a broadband frequency are extracted both in time and frequency domains. A method based on principal component analysis (PCA) is proposed to enhance the accuracy in identification of the edge of a defect, the agreement between theory and experiment shows that the proposed method is applicable and preferable to APECS.