Weld Inspection Based on Radiography Image Segmentation with Level Set Active Contour Guided Off-Center Saliency Map

Abstract

Radiography is one of the most used techniques in weld defect inspection. Weld defect detection becomes a complex task when uneven illumination and low contrast characterize radiographic images. In this paper we propose a new active contour based level set method for weld defect detection in radiography images. An off-center saliency map exploited as a feature to represent image pixels is embedded into a region energy minimization function to guide the level set active contour to defects boundaries. The aim behind using salient feature is that a small defect can frequently attract attention of human eyes which permits enhancing defects in low contrasted image. Experiment results on different weld radiographic images with various kinds of defects show robustness and good performance of the proposed approach comparing with other segmentation methods.