Flaw detection in radiographic weld images using morphological approach

It is necessary to detect suspected defect regions in the radiographic weld images to find the type of flaw and its causative factors. This requires processing of radiographic images by a suitable approach. This paper presents an approach to process these radiographic weld images of the weld specimens considering morphological aspects of the image. The proposed approach first determines the flaw boundaries by applying the Canny operator after choosing an appropriate threshold value. The boundaries are then fixed using a morphological image processing approach i.e. dilating few similar boundaries and eroding some irrelevant boundaries decided on the basis of pixel characteristics. The flaws detected by this approach are categorized according to their properties.