Detection and Classification of Invisible Weld Defects by Magneto-Optical Imaging under Alternating Magnetic Field Excitation

Aiming at the difficult to detect invisible weld defects, a magneto-optical (MO) imaging non-destructive testing (NDT) system excited by an alternating magnetic field is proposed for feature extraction and detection classification of invisible weld defects. The relationship between the MO image features and the magnetic field intensity is analyzed based on the Faraday MO effect. A magnetic dipole model is proposed to study the magnetic field distribution on weld defect. A three-dimensional finite element model of invisible weld defects (with a width of 0.01mm) is established, and the distribution of leakage magnetic field for different types of invisible defects is analyzed. In order to detect different invisible weld defects under the excitation of alternating magnetic field, MO imaging NDT experiments are carried out. The effectiveness of the finite element model is verified by the experiment. The gray value of the MO image can match the corresponding leakage magnetic field intensity. The Tamura method and gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) method are used to extract the texture features of natural invisible weld defect’s MO image, and these texture features of MO images are used as input data for the defect classification model established using back propagation (BP) neural network. Experimental results show that the classification accuracy of the GLCM + Tamura-BP model is higher than that of the GLCM-BP model, and its overall classification accuracy reaches 91.1%, indicating that this model can effectively and accurately classify natural invisible weld defects.