Impact Damage Detection and Identification Using Eddy Current Pulsed Thermography Through Integration of PCA and ICA

Eddy current pulsed thermography (ECPT) is implemented for detection and separation of impact damage and resulting damages in carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) samples. Complexity and nonhomogeneity of fiber texture as well as multiple defects limit detection identification and characterization from transient images of the ECPT. In this paper, an integration of principal component analysis (PCA) and independent component analysis (ICA) on transient thermal videos has been proposed. This method enables spatial and temporal patterns to be extracted according to the transient response behavior without any training knowledge. In the first step, using the PCA, the data is transformed to orthogonal principal component subspace and the dimension is reduced. Multichannel morphological component analysis, as an ICA method, is then implemented to deal with the sparse and independence property for detecting and separating the influences of different layers, defects, and their combination information in the CFRP. Because different transient behaviors exist, multiple types of defects can be identified and separated by calculating the cross-correlation of the estimated mixing vectors between impact the ECPT sequences and nondefect ECPT sequences.