Quantitative determination of a subsurface defect of reference specimen by lock-in infrared thermography

This paper describes the quantitative determination of the sizes and locations of subsurface defects using lock-in infrared thermography. A phase (or temperature) difference between the defect area and the healthy area indicates the qualitative location and size of the defect. To accurately estimate these parameters, the shearing-phase technique has been employed, where the inspected image is shifted by a certain number of pixels to obtain a shifted image while subtraction of one image from the other gives the shearing-phase distribution. The shearing-phase distribution has maximum, minimum, and zero points that help determine quantitatively the size and location of the subsurface defect. Experimental results for a steel plate with artificial subsurface defects show good agreement with actual values.