This paper presents the results of comparing two digital images acquired using two different light sources. One of the sources is a 50-W metal halide lamp located in the compartment of an industrial borescope and the other is a 1 W LED placed at the tip of the insertion tube of the borescope. The two images are compared quantitatively and qualitatively using feature extraction and luminance matching approaches. Quantitative methods included the images' histograms, intensity profiles along a line segment, edges, and luminance measurement. Qualitative methods included image registration and linear conformal transformation with eight control points. This transformation is useful when shapes in the input image are unchanged, but the image is distorted by some combination of translation, rotation. and scaling. The gray-level histogram, edge detection, image profile and image registration do not offer conclusive results. The LED light source, however, produces good images for visual inspection by the operator. The paper presents the results and discusses the usefulness and shortcomings of various comparison methods.
