Accurate Detection of a Defective Area by Adopting a Divide and Conquer Strategy in Infrared Thermal Imaging Measurement

Abstract

Aiming at infrared thermal images with different buried depth defects, we study a variety of image segmentation algorithms based on the threshold to develop global search ability and the ability to find the defect area accurately. Firstly, the iterative thresholding method, the maximum entropy method, the minimum error method, the Ostu method and the minimum skewness method are applied to image segmentation of the same infrared thermal image. The study shows that the maximum entropy method and the minimum error method have strong global search capability and can simultaneously extract defects at different depths. However none of these five methods can accurately calculate the defect area at different depths. In order to solve this problem, we put forward a strategy of “divide and conquer”. The infrared thermal image is divided into several local thermal maps, with each map containing only one defect, and the defect area is calculated after local image processing of the different buried defects one by one. The results show that, under the “divide and conquer” strategy, the iterative threshold method and the Ostu method have the advantage of high precision and can accurately extract the area of different defects at different depths, with an error of less than 5%.