Defect Identification of Pipeline Ultrasonic Inspection Based on Multi-Feature Fusion and Multi-Criteria Feature Evaluation

Abstract

This paper presents a novel model for ultrasonic defect identification relying on multi-feature fusion and multi-criteria feature evaluation (MFF-MCFE). Based on feature extraction, feature selection, pattern recognition and data fusion algorithm, this model analyzes ultrasonic echo signal data from single-probe ultrasonic inspection, and based on wavelet packet transform (WPT), empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT), the main features from the collected ultrasonic echo signals are also extracted. These features are also evaluated by means of Representation Entropy (RE), Fisher’s ratio (FR) and Mahalanobis distance (MD), and the results are fused with Dempster–Shafer (D-S) evidence theory and the corresponding feature subsets are formed according to the fusion result. The support vector machine (SVM) is used as the classifier to recognize the defect signal, and the subsequent classification results are integrated by D-S evidence theory, which leads to the final recognition results. On this basis, a series of experiments were carried out to compare the performance of the developed model with that of the models using single feature sets and single feature evaluation criterion. Meanwhile, the principal component analysis (PCA) was also involved in the corresponding comparative analysis. The experimental results showed that this model is suitable for the identification and diagnosis of pipeline defects, and its classification accuracy could be reached up to 96.29% with stronger robustness and stability.