Samim Ahmadi

Samim Ahmadi, Linh Kästner, Jan Christian Hauffen et al.

This paper presents deep unfolding neural networks to handle inverse problems in photothermal radiometry enabling super resolution (SR) imaging. Photothermal imaging is a well-known technique in active thermography for nondestructive inspection of defects in materials such as metals or composites. A grand challenge of active thermography is to overcome the spatial resolution limitation imposed by heat diffusion in order to accurately resolve each defect. The photothermal SR approach enables to extract high-frequency spatial components based on the deconvolution with the thermal point spread function. However, stable deconvolution can only be achieved by using the sparse structure of defect patterns, which often requires tedious, hand-crafted tuning of hyperparameters and results in computationally intensive algorithms. On this account, Photothermal-SR-Net is proposed in this paper, which performs deconvolution by deep unfolding considering the underlying physics. This enables to super resolve 2D thermal images for nondestructive testing with a substantially improved convergence rate. Since defects appear sparsely in materials, Photothermal-SR-Net applies trained block-sparsity thresholding to the acquired thermal images in each convolutional layer. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated and discussed using various deep unfolding and thresholding approaches applied to 2D thermal images. Subsequently, studies are conducted on how to increase the reconstruction quality and the computational performance of Photothermal-SR-Net is evaluated. Thereby, it was found that the computing time for creating high-resolution images could be significantly reduced without decreasing the reconstruction quality by using pixel binning as a preprocessing step.

Samim Ahmadi, Jan Christian Hauffen, Linh Kästner et al.

Block-sparse regularization is already well-known in active thermal imaging and is used for multiple measurement based inverse problems. The main bottleneck of this method is the choice of regularization parameters which differs for each experiment. To avoid time-consuming manually selected regularization parameter, we propose a learned block-sparse optimization approach using an iterative algorithm unfolded into a deep neural network. More precisely, we show the benefits of using a learned block iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm that is able to learn the choice of regularization parameters. In addition, this algorithm enables the determination of a suitable weight matrix to solve the underlying inverse problem. Therefore, in this paper we present the algorithm and compare it with state of the art block iterative shrinkage thresholding using synthetically generated test data and experimental test data from active thermography for defect reconstruction. Our results show that the use of the learned block-sparse optimization approach provides smaller normalized mean square errors for a small fixed number of iterations than without learning. Thus, this new approach allows to improve the convergence speed and only needs a few iterations to generate accurate defect reconstruction in photothermal super resolution imaging.

Linh Kästner, Samim Ahmadi, Florian Jonietz et al.

Spot welding is a crucial process step in various industries. However, classification of spot welding quality is still a tedious process due to the complexity and sensitivity of the test material, which drain conventional approaches to its limits. In this paper, we propose an approach for quality inspection of spot weldings using images from laser thermography data.We propose data preparation approaches based on the underlying physics of spot welded joints, heated with pulsed laser thermography by analyzing the intensity over time and derive dedicated data filters to generate training datasets. Subsequently, we utilize convolutional neural networks to classify weld quality and compare the performance of different models against each other. We achieve competitive results in terms of classifying the different welding quality classes compared to traditional approaches, reaching an accuracy of more than 95 percent. Finally, we explore the effect of different augmentation methods.