Defect Detection and Quantification Toolbox (DDQT)

The domain of Nondestructive Testing (NDT) and Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) comprise of techniques that are used to evaluate the state of health of a structure without causing any damage to the structure being inspected. Typical examples of structures being inspected include aircraft components, bridges, nuclear reactors, etc. Defect Detection and Quantification Toolbox (DDQT) aims to provide a framework to automate the routine tasks for researchers in the field of NDT and SHM.

In the fields of NDT and SHM, experiments are performed using a variety of modalities like Ultrasound, Infrared Thermography, X-Rays, etc. Matlab is often used to perform experiments. Typically, the resulting data is very often a 3D dataset comprising of time axis and 2D spatial axis. Once the data is obtained, a variety of visualization checks are performed. Following this, features are created at each and every spatial location in the time series. Some examples of the types of features are based on time series, gradients, spatial filters, etc. At this stage, to avoid the curse of dimensionality, a feature reduction step is performed using PCA in case of unsupervised defect detection. Once the subset of meaningful features is identified, the defect regions are detected using a statistical distance metric like Mahalanobis distance. In DDQT, we also propose a realatively newer method to identify defects using Isolation Forests. Following this, the performance of the feature space and detection algorithms is quantified using Receiver Operating Curves (ROC) curves compared to the raw data. The performance is quantified using commonly used classification metrics such as True Positive Rate (TPR), False Positive Rate (FPR) and Area Under Curve (AUC). A visual representation of these metrics is presented using charts to aid the user.

While there are clearly defined steps that researchers in field of NDT and SHM often pursue, to the best of our knowledge there are no offerings that provide a framework so researchers can mainly focus on the feature space and tweaking the defect detection algorithms. With very minimal edits to the driver program, researchers can visualize the results with ease and focus on the underlying physics to improve the performance of defect detection instead of spending much time and effort on setting up the pipeline process.

In Summary, `DDQT` can be used for;

  • Reading in Matlab data

  • Visualizing data

  • Creating features in the time and spatial domain

  • Feature reduction using PCA

  • Identifying defects using Mahalanobis distance and Isolation Forest

  • Quantifying results using ROC curves

  • Visualizing outcomes

There are numerous avenues to enhance this toolbox. I welcome any contributions to this program. Some possible areas that could use improvements are;

  • Improvements in feature space

  • Improvements to defect detection algorithms

  • Coding enhancements

  • Documentation enhancements

  • Currently, only certain time stamps are used in calculating computationally intensive features. There is scope to write more computationally efficient code to handle more time stamps (if not everything…)

  • Possibility of including circular defects - currently, defects are defined using polygon vertices

If you would like to collaborate with me in improving this toolbox or if you would like to provide sample data, please reach out to me at

>>>my_first_name = 'arun'
>>>print(str(my_first_name) + 'mano121@outlook.com')

Feel free to fork and add any enhancements, and let me know if a pull request is needed to merge the changes.

If you use this work in your research, please cite using;

@software{ArunManohar_20210322,
  author       = {Arun Manohar},
  title        = {{Defect Detection and Quantification Toolbox (DDQT)}},
  month        = mar,
  year         = 2021,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  version      = {v0.1.0},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.4627984},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4627984}
}

Thank you!