Lightweight deep learning model for nondestructive evaluation of crack defects
Date
2024
Authors
Jia, Yixiang
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Abstract
Ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation (NDE) is an essential tool in various industries including aerospace, energy, and civil engineering, for assessing the structural integrity of manufactured products without damaging them. This thesis is focused on the automated analysis of ultrasonic NDE data by means of low-cost machine learning (ML) techniques, particularly in the context of inline pipeline inspection. We propose two lightweight neural network architectures for efficient multi-attribute classification to characterize surface-breaking crack defects in terms of their location, size, and tilt. Our networks have under 2M parameters and incorporate novel design elements inspired by the latest MobileNet models. Their computational footprint is also small, not exceeding 100M floating-point operations (FLOPs) per data sample. The proposed models process raw channel data acquired by a transducer array, as opposed to multi-view beamformed image patches utilized in related works, thus eliminating the computational burden associated with image reconstruction. Our evaluation results, based on a public-domain NDE dataset, demonstrate that our networks offer a balanced combination of their competitively high classification performance and low cost. These findings highlight the potential of lightweight deep learning models in ultrasonic NDE data analysis, which contributes to the development of more advanced and intelligent inspection systems.
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Keywords
Deep Learning, Ultrasound Image