Ultrasonic array imaging of porosity defects with contrast enhancement based on dominant response subtraction

Porosity defects can be found in many engineering structures and their inspection remains a challenge in the field of ultrasonic non-destructive testing. In this paper, ultrasonic array imaging of porosity defects has been studied with the aim of improving the image quality in the “dead zone”, which is caused by the masking effects of the uppermost pores. The proposed approach first extracts contributions of the uppermost pores based on a single scattering model by adopting convolutional sparse coding. The extracted dominant contributions are then subtracted from the array data before forming an image, facilitating detection and localization of pores in the shadow zone. The performance of the proposed approach has been studied in simulation and experiments, and the mean localization errors of the pores are small (i.e., within 0.27 mm or 0.14λ). In addition, the effects of measurement noise and imaging parameters on robustness of the imaging result have been analyzed, providing guidelines for practical implementation of the proposed approach.