| In this thesis, independent component analysis (ICA) is proposed for enhancing flaw information in eddy current nondestructive evaluation (NDE). ICA provides a method for representing data as weighted combination of independent components and higher-order statistics of the data is used to minimize the dependence between the components of the system output. Multi-frequency eddy current testing is a widely used NDE method in situations where the defect signal is corrupted by noise and contributions from external supports that makes the analysis challenging. ICA, along with an affine transformation as a preprocessing stage, is shown to extract the defect signal from a combination of defect, support and noise signals, while improving the SNR. |
