Rapid Defect Detection for Spacecraft in Infrared Reconstructed Images Using Image Mosaic Technique

Abstract

In order to satisfy the real-time and large scale requirement of spacecraft nondestructive testing using optical pulsed thermography, in this research, we propose a novel approach based on image mosaic technique which can create large scale or panoramic image mosaics from a set of ordered infrared reconstruction images with overlapping areas for defect detection. First, infrared reconstruction images are extracted from the original thermal video stream by the ICA method based on the idea of blind source signal processing. Then for this research’s special mosaic object, a fast and accurate registration scheme is proposed. Abundant scale rotation invariant feature points are quickly obtained by using the hybrid feature detector and descriptor. Moreover, the feature matching process is realized by applying two-way FLANN and MSAC, parameters of the geometric transformation matrix are estimated by MSAC, and image mosaic is realized according to the geometric transformation model. The experimental results convinced the validity and efficiency of the proposed method.