Assessment of welding defects for gas pipeline radiographs using computer vision

Abstract

In this paper, a novel automated vision system is introduced to detect and assess the welding defects of gas pipelines from the radiographic films. The proposed vision system was used to capture images for the radiographic films and apply various image processing and computer vision algorithms to detect the welding defects and to calculate necessary information such as length, width, area and perimeter of the defects. A developed software, named AutoWDA, has been fully written in lab using Microsoft Visual C++6 to perform the analysis process. The proposed system offers many advantages such as enhancing the captured images so that the defects appear much clear and eliminating the loss of image details, which occurs due to film deterioration by the time, by transferring the radiographic films into digitized images, which could be saved on magnetic mass storage media. The proposed system is considered quite cheap compared with commercial radiographic image enhancement systems. © 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.