Image fusion of ultrasonic and thermographic inspection of carbon/epoxy patches bonded to an aluminum plate

Inspecting damaged structures repaired with composite patches is one of the most challenging issues of different industries, especially in aeronautical vehicles. Various inspection methods such as ultrasonic (UT) and thermographic methods are commonly applied to the patches and bondings. Although, both ultrasonic and thermographic inspections have their own capabilities, they are also associated with some limitations especially in the inspection of complicated structures such as multilayers. Different data fusion techniques can be used to overcome these limitations, by exploiting the advantages of each inspection technique to achieve the goal to have a more precise and reliable defects assessment. In this paper, different image fusion algorithms are used to fuse the UT C-scan and thermal images obtained from thermographic inspection of carbon/epoxy patches bonded to an aluminum plate. The inspected specimen contained several delaminations of various sizes and locations along with some disbond defects which were artificially embedded in five samples of composite patches. The resulting images of 28 fusion algorithms and the input images have been quantitatively compared using Average Differences (AD) to clarify the efficiency of the fusion algorithm. Comparing results revealed that contrast pyramid was selected as the best image fusion algorithms which can be used for NDE fusion of carbon/epoxy patches bonded to an aluminum plate.