Automatic weld defect detection based on potential defect tracking in real-time radiographic image sequence

An effective and adaptive method is proposed to automatically detect weld defects using defect tracking in real-time radiographic image sequence of a moving weld. Firstly, a defect segmentation algorithm with low threshold is used to segment all of the potential weld defects in each image of the sequence. Then the modified Hough transform is employed to track the center of gravity of potential defects in image sequence, and the potential defects that cannot be tracked are eliminated as false defects. Experiment results show that the proposed method can detect weld defects with high certainty and avoid false alarms caused by the noise.