An Ultrasonic Pattern Recognition Approach to Welding Defect Classification

Classification of flaws in weldments from their ultrasonic scattering signals is very important in quantitative nondestructive evaluation. This problem is ideally suited to a modern ultrasonic pattern recognition technique. Here brief discussion on systematic approach to this methodology is presented including ultrasonic feature extraction, feature selection and classification. A stronger emphasis is placed on probabilistic neural networks as efficient classifiers for many practical classification problems. In an example probabilistic neural networks are applied to classify flaws in weldments into 3 classes such as cracks, porosity and slag inclusions. Probabilistic nets are shown to be able to exhibit high performance of other classifiers without any training time overhead. In addition, forward selection scheme for sensitive features is addressed to enhance network performance