Study on intelligent image recognition for the tube welding defects in pressure vessels

Currently, the welding defects recognition of X-ray nondestructive inspection is principally carried out by manual work, which highly depends on the experience of the inspectors and costs plenty of workload. In this paper, an intelligent image processing and recognition method for the tube welding radiographic testing in large-scale pressure vessels is proposed. Firstly, the raw image is preprocessed by median filtering, pseudo point removing and non-linear image enhancement. Secondly, the welded joints parts are separated from the whole image by edge detection and threshold segmentation algorithms. Then, the separated images are handled by FFT transformation. Finally, whether defects exist and the specific type of defects are judged by Support Vector Machine. Software developed basing on this method works stably on site, and experiments demonstrate that the recognition results are compliance with the JB/T 4730.2 or ASME standards.