3D infrared-terahertz fusion non-destructive inspection for cultural heritage and composite materials

Abstract

Defects inside cultural heritage objects and composite structures have the potential to cause extensive damage. There is a need to develop 3D non-destructive imaging techniques to determine and visualize the positions of defects. The aim of this research is to develop a new non-destructive imaging technique using infrared-terahertz fusion approach. Recently, time-domain terahertz and infrared tomography proved the capability of providing 3D imaging. To combine the advantages of the two non-destructive imaging techniques, a feature-based fusion algorithm is designed in order to fuse the images generated by the systems. The fusion images show the slices through the thickness, i.e.from the surface to a known depth of the specimens themselves. Finally, a 3D visualized model is reconstructed by combining these through-depth slices