Enhanced Defect Detection in Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer Composites via Generative Kernel Principal Component Thermography

Increasing machine learning methods are being applied to infrared non-destructive assessment for internal defects assessment of composite materials. However, most of them extract only linear features, which is not in accord with the nonlinear characteristics of infrared data. Moreover, limited infrared images tend to restrict the data analysis capabilities of machine learning methods. In this work, a novel generative kernel principal component thermography (GKPCT) method is proposed for defect detection of carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) composites. Specifically, the spectral normalization generative adversarial network is proposed to augment the thermograms for model construction. Sequentially, the KPCT method is used by feature mapping of all thermogram data using kernel principal component analysis, which allows for differentiation of defects and background in the dimensionality-reduced data. Additionally, a defect-background separation metric is designed to help the performance evaluation of data analysis methods. Experimental results on CFRP demonstrate the feasibility and advantages of the proposed GKPCT method.