On the use of pulsed thermography signal reconstruction based on linear support vector regression for carbon fiber reinforced polymer inspection

This study introduces and evaluates a new approach to reconstruct image sequences acquired during non-destructive testing by pulsed thermography. The proposed method consists of applying two linear support vector regressions to model the evolution of the data from both a spatial and temporal point of view. Each regression vectors will map the data with the number of pixels and the number of frames using convex optimisation. Then the regression vectors are used to predict a more robust representation of the data, thus reconstructing the sequence. The proposed method has been applied to data related to a reference sample of carbon reinforced fibre with known defects. This approach was evaluated on a sequence with severe non-uniform heating and was compared with state-of-the-art methods. Despite being sensitive to non-uniform heating, the proposed method provided a higher CNR score on smaller defects, compared with state-of-the-art methods. For the shallowest defects it shows better performance in term of contrast reconstruction compared to partial least-squares thermography (PLST). It also outperforms principal component thermography (PCT), and thermographic signal reconstruction-PCT (TSR-PCT) for defects located at a depth of 0.6 mm and 0.8 mm below the surface.