Image processing for radiographic films of weld inspection

F. Faramarzi and M. Motamedi

Abstract - One of the professional domains in industry is weld inspection which deals with investigating the inside or outside (surface) of the weld to trace any defects which may cause failure in the system. Likewise, one of the methods of weld inspection is radiographic film interpretation (RI). In this method the specific weld will be captured in radiographic films and then an inspector will interpret them to identify any defects similar to the job that an orthopaedist does. The aim of this paper is to develop a fully automatic computer vision system to analyse welds radiographic films for defects detection. For this, the adaptive method of smoothing plus thresholding has been applied first. This is followed by a morphological operation to remove small objects, and then further smoothing has been used and finally by applying a boundary detection method, the boundary of the defects has been delineated. To validate the software, the method was applied on several weld radiographic films which possess distinct defects. The system was able to detect all defects which were visually confirmed by an expert.

I. INTRODUCTION

elding is the joining of materials in the welding zone by the application of heat and/or pressure, with or without the addition of filler material. This is often done by melting the work pieces and adding a filler material to form a pool of molten material (the weld pool) that cools to become a strong joint. Auxiliary materials, for example shielding gases, flux or pastes may be used to render the process possible or to facilitate it. The energy required for welding is supplied by outside sources. The materials could be sheets, plates, pipes or some industrial productions such as boiler, reactor, and heat exchanger and so on (Agreste, 2006).

On the other hand, there are many different welding methods that depend on the accuracy of the process; the weld designer chooses the one which is appropriate. Meanwhile, one of the most important areas in industry is safety check. In other words, we can consider if, in a site, the construction of a reactor is finished and every joint is welded and ask is it ready to go in the line and start working because, after doing construction in every production industries, the quality control part should check the components, quality, quantity and many other parameters which are important for the quality of the product and effect efficiency of that. In addition, the other famous and vital part of quality control is inspection that investigates if the product is ready to go on line or has some problems and should be repaired. In the welding field, like many other industries, after operation by welder, the weld inspector should inspect the work piece to see whether it has any defects such as crack, porosity and so on or not (Kwon, et all. 2003). Imagine there is a reactor in a refinery site which works in around 1000 degree of Celsius and more that 500 bars pressure. If this reactor failed, it would be like an atomic bomb, which can destroy its entire environment within at least 1 kilometre radius. Thus the refinery, which has this reactor, spends much money to inspect its components like welds per year. The inspection engineering team inspects all of the welds that the reactor has by means of different methods dependent on the condition and accuracy of the job (Vandevoorde and Josuttis, 2003). There are several different types of weld inspection which are briefly described below. It should be considered which part of weld is important the most, which means that the inspector is looking for a crack on the weld surface or inside it, he is looking for any defect whether it is a coarse one or very fine one, he is looking for one particular defect or cluster shape of defects. Depending on these and many other factors the weld designer can choose a method to inspect the weld. One of the very prevalent methods of inspection in industries is Radiographic Testing Interpretation

Manuscript received May 14, 2011. This work has been supported by the Kingston University London, Engineering Faculty. Farrokh Faramarzi, MSc. Mechatronics Systems Student, Kingston University London (United Kingdom), (Phone: +44(0)7411304849, e-mail: k1041765@kingston.ac.uk) Mohammadreza Motamedi, MSc. Mechatronics Systems Student, Kingston University London (United Kingdom), (Phone: +44(0)7783839225, e-mail: k1043603@kingston.ac.uk) The authors are currently writing their thesis about designing and manufacturing a mobile robot which should go through a pipe and inspect the inside surface automatically by digital image processing.

(RTI). In this way, a technician captures radiographic films of welds, then a weld interpreter starts to interpret the films and find defects visually by means of specific light (the job that an orthopaedic doctor does). The interpreter does this by using his knowledge and experiences and recognising the different kinds of defects. On the other hand, in electrical engineering and computer science, computer vision system is any (computerised algorithm) form of image processing for which the input is an image, such as a photograph or video frame. Moreover, the output of image processing may be either an image or a set of characteristics or parameters correlated to the image. Furthermore, the purpose of this research is to develop a fully automatic computer vision system to analyse welds radiographic films for defect detection. The rest of this project is organized as follows: the next section describes the image acquisition radiographic films of welds and then four different prevalent types of weld defects in industry will be explained. Following that image processing algorithm will be shown in four steps, and finally the experimental results of other images would be illustrated. II. METHODOLOGY A. Image acquisition In Figure 1 a section view of a weld between two captured from the cap (top) of the weld and by developing the film, it will be available for the interpreter. For capturing the image of the weld, the camera should be located above the specimen with particular distance to emit the X-ray. Likewise, the raw-film should be placed behind the specimen and after the film processing; the final image will be ready to interpret by inspector.

Fig. 1. Section view of a weld, welding two sheets (a), section view of the weld (b), radiographic film of the weld (c) sheets can be seen. The radiographic film is [3]

III. TYPES OF DEFECTS In this paper from all different types of defects in weld inspection, four major ones will be discussed which is seen in many troubled materials in industry. They are Burn Through, LOF, LOP and Slag.

A. Burn Through A Burn Through is a defect which is a localised collapse of the molten pool due to excessive penetration resulting in a hole in the weld run (Figure 2). In this defect the edge of the root will not be sharp and it is one sign to recognise it in the radiographic film. In Figure 3 a film of Burn Through is shown. In this film (Figure 3) there are two separated areas in the middle of the weld which the intensity of them is less than other parts.

Fig. 6. Lack of Penetration (LOP)

Fig. 7. Radiographic film of LOP (Lack of Penetration) Fig. 2. Burn Through [3]

Fig. 3. Radiographic film of Burn Through

B. Lack of Fusion (LOF) One of the other defects which can be found in weld inspection is called Lack of fusion (LOF). In this defect during the welding, the side wall of the sheet and melt material does not fuse together (Figure 4 and 5). Consider Figure 5, there are some black lines in the same direction which shows LOF.

D. Slag The other prevalent defect in weld inspection is Slag (Figure 8). Interpass slag inclusions usually consist of non-metallic impurities that solidified on the weld surface and were not removed between weld passes. The specific properties of this defect that can be found out from the radiographic film (Figure 9) is as irregularly shaped darker density spot, usually slightly elongated and randomly spaced.

Fig. 8. Slag in the weld

Fig. 4. Lack of Fusion (LOF)

Fig. 9. Radiographic film of Slag

IV. IMAGE PROCESSING ALGORITHM Step one, smoothing plus thresholding So that the image is processed in black and white thresholding should be used. Then a smoothing operation can be applied to clean the image. However the question is which one should be used first. As it can be seen in Figure 4 the results of thresholding and smoothing are very similar, but by looking closely you can see some small differences around the holes, which indicates that the latter technique should be used. More specifically, the aim of image smoothing is to enhance the resolution of camera images, therefore will be the primary image processing algorithm followed by thresholding.

Fig. 5. Radiographic films of LOF (Lack of Fusion)

C. Lack of Penetration (LOP) One of the other common defects in welding is Lack of penetration (LOP), in this defect the melt weld material cannot reach to the root of the weld and the root will not be welded (Figure 6). Considering the radiographical film of LOP (Figure 7) the edges of the weld will stay sharp like a long (or short) line.

region which we need here. The results from Figures 11 and 12 show, it is appropriate to dilate the image only to erode it (do not use closing operation). This is because eroding the image the boundary will shrink the right hole and get a bad result. After using many other morphology operations such as erosion, opening, closing, and skeletonisation, it was found that using a closing operation after dilation yields a positive result (Figure 13).
Fig. 10. Deciding which step is better at first smoothing then thresholding (a) or thresholding then smoothing (b)

The purpose of this process is to specify two defects (Burn Through) in the film so it is possible to segment the objects in the image. Segmentation refers to the operation of partitioning an image into component parts or into separate object so that only the defects are visible. One of the most prevalent uses of segmentation is thresholding which has different uses; single thresholding, double thresholding, adaptive thresholding and global thresholding. This image was chosen since it was needed to threshold by means of histogram computing, and global thresholding. By using thresholding all of the pixels in an image change to either 0 (black) or 1 (white). The threshold in this image is 0.3882, which means that all of the pixels under 0.3882 become 0 and all pixels above 0.3882 become 1. Step two, Morphology operation The next step is to use Morphology operations, for continuing image is in Figure 10. First the boundaries of the welds should be connected via a closing operation. By means of closing operation the objects connect to each other and fill the holes in a region, as well as eliminate inlets on the boundary. See Figure 11.

Fig. 13. Using closing operation after Figure 12

Step three, Smoothing As Figure 13 shows, the edges of the cap are much unshaped and another command should be used to clean it. So image smoothing has been used again to solve this problem; however there are several types of smoothing such as average, disk, Gaussian, laplacian, log, motion, prewitt, sobel, unsharp, that can be utilised. After visual testing and examining of them, the most efficient one will be chosen and the best result will be achieved. See Figure 14. In this step, the edge was examined for specifying which holes a programme had to be written for by means of edge function. It also tested different types of edges such as sobel, prewitt, roberts, canny and zerocross. The best one, which was sobel, did not give suitable result (Figure 15).

Fig. 14. Using smoothing, disk type after Figure 13

Fig. 11. Using closing operation (Morphology)

Fig. 15. Using edge function

On the other hand, since the closing operation consists of dilation and then erosion operations dilation was used as well (Figure 12).

Step four, Boundary functions After testing is completed a boundary should be drawn around the holes to specify defects. Before identifying the boundaries, the black and white pixels should be reserved, since the boundary function can detect white regions only and the specified regions are black (Figure 16).

Fig. 12. Using dilation operation (Morphology)

As you know dilation operation allows objects to expand, connects disjoint objects and enlarges a

Fig. 16. Convert the black and white pixels to each other

By writing boundary functions in the software it is possible to get all of the holes in the image however the problem is that the computer will recognise the two big spaces in two sides of holes as objects and draw boundary around them as well (Figure 17). In Figure 17 the software recognises four holes. One positive solution is to introduce the two specified holes to the computer for obtaining the boundary. In order to do this, labelling commands

Fig. 19. Processed image of radiographic film of Burn Through

V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND DISCUSSION This part has illustrated the final results, written by MATLAB software, by comparing the primary images via visual inspection. Likewise, more images will be processed to show that different images can be processed by the same program. Here, radiographic films with several specific defects have been shown. A. Burn Through As it has been shown in the first part of the process as well as these images, it is possible to achieve the best solution and reduce the time. In the last image (c) the two cavities in the pipe are marked by the red circles (Figure 20).

Fig. 17. Getting boundary (not acceptable result)

have been used. By means of this function all four holes will be separated and then function label 2 and 3 will be added to each other. See the result in Figure 18.

Fig. 18. Adding label 2 and 3 from Figure 17

When the boundary functions are written, it would just specify the two holes. Figure 19 indicates the boundaries by showing the original image.

Fig. 20. Burn Through

B. Lack of Penetration (LOP)

Fig. 24. Slag Fig. 21. Lack of Penetration (LOP)

C. Lack of Fusion (LOF)

Regarding the programs that we should write for the computer, the images will be processed and recognised so that we know type and distance of each image. As a final point, it is interesting to note that by designing this program the films would be interpreted automatically along with detailed computer reports. Regarding the advantages of this idea, we can save time and, increase accuracy, as that it has been mentioned above.

Fig. 22. Lack of Fusion (LOF)

VI. Conclusion Taking everything into consideration, the aim of this paper was to show that image processing has been done for some radiographic films and the related defects have been specified in each image by this process. As it had been shown before, they have been done by some prevalent operations in image processing such as point processing, filtering, image smoothing, edge detection, segmentation (using thresholding), boundary tracing, region labeling, and Morphology operations. These functions lead us to write the program which takes the image as an input and gives the defects and their details as an output. (Pudney, 1998) A method has been developed to detect the defect in the weld. Using the radiographic images for this digital image, several image processing algorithms were applied and the system has been validated by visual judgment. Finally the result is very encouraging and shows the potential use of the system for more application in the field of weld inspection. To sum up, by developing the technology in industries and considering that everything has been changing daily, we should find solutions for saving time and keeping accuracy in each process. It is obvious that the conclusion vision and image processing can have a bright future in weld inspection. In order to achieve this, digital image

Fig. 23. Lack of Fusion (LOF)

D. Slag One of the major problems in film are the many different possible interpretations of each observer. Each interpreter has their own idea and although most of the time the interpretations are the same, some complex films interpreters have different thoughts. Moreover, manual interpreting takes a lot of time. This means that a qualified interpreter should watch the film carefully, recognise the defects and write report of it.

processing is definitely one of the most critical technologies for solving numerous problems that human face with in reality.

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