Image processing for radiographic films of weld inspection
F. Faramarzi and M. Motamedi
Abstract - One of the professional domains in
industry is weld inspection which deals with
investigating the inside or outside (surface) of the
weld to trace any defects which may cause failure in
the system. Likewise, one of the methods of weld
inspection is radiographic film interpretation (RI). In
this method the specific weld will be captured in
radiographic films and then an inspector will
interpret them to identify any defects similar to the
job that an orthopaedist does.
The aim of this paper is to develop a fully
automatic computer vision system to analyse weld’s
radiographic films for defects detection. For this, the
adaptive method of smoothing plus thresholding has
been applied first. This is followed by a
morphological operation to remove small objects, and
then further smoothing has been used and finally by
applying a boundary detection method, the boundary
of the defects has been delineated. To validate the
software, the method was applied on several weld
radiographic films which possess distinct defects. The
system was able to detect all defects which were
visually confirmed by an expert.
I. INTRODUCTION
W elding is the joining of materials in the
welding zone by the application of heat
and/or pressure, with or without the addition of
filler material. This is often done by melting the
work pieces and adding a filler material to form a
pool of molten material (the weld pool) that cools
to become a strong joint. Auxiliary materials, for
example shielding gases, flux or pastes may be
used to render the process possible or to facilitate
it. The energy required for welding is supplied by
outside sources. The materials could be sheets,
plates, pipes or some industrial productions such as
boiler, reactor, and heat exchanger and so on
(Agreste, 2006).
Manuscript received May 14, 2011. This work has been
supported by the Kingston University London, Engineering
Faculty.
Farrokh Faramarzi, MSc. Mechatronics Systems Student,
Kingston University London (United Kingdom), (Phone:
+44(0)7411304849, e-mail: k1041765@kingston.ac.uk)
Mohammadreza Motamedi, MSc. Mechatronics Systems
Student, Kingston University London (United Kingdom),
(Phone: +44(0)7783839225, e-mail: k1043603@kingston.ac.uk)
The authors are currently writing their thesis about
designing and manufacturing a mobile robot which should go
through a pipe and inspect the inside surface automatically by
digital image processing.
On the other hand, there are many different
welding methods that depend on the accuracy of
the process; the weld designer chooses the one
which is appropriate.
Meanwhile, one of the most important areas in
industry is safety check. In other words, we can
consider if, in a site, the construction of a reactor is
finished and every joint is welded and ask is it
ready to go in the line and start working because,
after doing construction in every production
industries, the quality control part should check the
components, quality, quantity and many other
parameters which are important for the quality of
the product and effect efficiency of that.
In addition, the other famous and vital part of
quality control is inspection that investigates if the
product is ready to go on line or has some problems
and should be repaired. In the welding field, like
many other industries, after operation by welder,
the weld inspector should inspect the work piece to
see whether it has any defects such as crack,
porosity and so on or not (Kwon, et all. 2003).
Imagine there is a reactor in a refinery site which
works in around 1000 degree of Celsius and more
that 500 bars pressure. If this reactor failed, it
would be like an atomic bomb, which can destroy
its entire environment within at least 1 kilometre
radius. Thus the refinery, which has this reactor,
spends much money to inspect its components like
welds per year. The inspection engineering team
inspects all of the welds that the reactor has by
means of different methods dependent on the
condition and accuracy of the job (Vandevoorde
and Josuttis, 2003).
There are several different types of weld
inspection which are briefly described below. It
should be considered which part of weld is
important the most, which means that the inspector
is looking for a crack on the weld surface or inside
it, he is looking for any defect whether it is a coarse
one or very fine one, he is looking for one
particular defect or cluster shape of defects.
Depending on these and many other factors the
weld designer can choose a method to inspect the
weld.
One of the very prevalent methods of inspection
in industries is Radiographic Testing Interpretation
(RTI). In this way, a technician captures
radiographic films of welds, then a weld interpreter
starts to interpret the films and find defects visually
by means of specific light (the job that an
orthopaedic doctor does). The interpreter does this
by using his knowledge and experiences and
recognising the different kinds of defects.
On the other hand, in electrical engineering and
computer science, computer vision system is any
(computerised algorithm) form of image
processing for which the input is an image, such as
a photograph or video frame. Moreover, the output
of image processing may be either an image or a
set of characteristics or parameters correlated to the
image. Furthermore, the purpose of this research is
to develop a fully automatic computer vision
system to analyse weld’s radiographic films for
defect detection.
The rest of this project is organized as follows:
the next section describes the image acquisition
radiographic films of welds and then four different
prevalent types of weld defects in industry will be
explained. Following that image processing Fig. 1. Section view of a weld, welding two sheets (a),
algorithm will be shown in four steps, and finally section view of the weld (b), radiographic film of the
the experimental results of other images would be weld (c) sheets can be seen. The radiographic film is [3]
illustrated.

II. METHODOLOGY
A. Image acquisition
In Figure 1 a section view of a weld between two
captured from the cap (top) of the weld and by
developing the film, it will be available for the
interpreter.
For capturing the image of the weld, the camera
should be located above the specimen with
particular distance to emit the X-ray. Likewise, the
raw-film should be placed behind the specimen and
after the film processing; the final image will be
ready to interpret by inspector.
III. TYPES OF DEFECTS
In this paper from all different types of defects
in weld inspection, four major ones will be
discussed which is seen in many troubled materials
in industry. They are Burn Through, LOF, LOP and
Slag.
A. Burn Through
A Burn Through is a defect which is a localised
collapse of the molten pool due to excessive
penetration resulting in a hole in the weld run
(Figure 2). In this defect the edge of the root will
not be sharp and it is one sign to recognise it in the
radiographic film. In Figure 3 a film of Burn
Through is shown.
In this film (Figure 3) there are two separated
areas in the middle of the weld which the intensity
of them is less than other parts.

Fig. 2. Burn Through [3]
Fig. 3. Radiographic film of Burn Through
B. Lack of Fusion (LOF)
One of the other defects which can be found in
weld inspection is called Lack of fusion (LOF). In
this defect during the welding, the side wall of the
sheet and melt material does not fuse together
(Figure 4 and 5). Consider Figure 5, there are some
black lines in the same direction which shows LOF.
Fig. 4. Lack of Fusion (LOF)
Fig. 5. Radiographic films of LOF (Lack of Fusion)
C. Lack of Penetration (LOP)
One of the other common defects in welding is
Lack of penetration (LOP), in this defect the melt
weld material cannot reach to the root of the weld
and the root will not be welded (Figure 6).
Considering the radiographical film of LOP (Figure
7) the edges of the weld will stay sharp like a long
(or short) line.
Fig. 6. Lack of Penetration (LOP)
Fig. 7. Radiographic film of LOP (Lack of Penetration)
D. Slag
The other prevalent defect in weld inspection is
Slag (Figure 8). Interpass slag inclusions usually
consist of non-metallic impurities that solidified on
the weld surface and were not removed between
weld passes. The specific properties of this defect
that can be found out from the radiographic film
(Figure 9) is as irregularly shaped darker density
spot, usually slightly elongated and randomly
spaced.
Fig. 8. Slag in the weld
Fig. 9. Radiographic film of Slag
IV. IMAGE PROCESSING ALGORITHM
Step one, smoothing plus thresholding
So that the image is processed in black and
white thresholding should be used. Then a
smoothing operation can be applied to clean the
image. However the question is which one should
be used first. As it can be seen in Figure 4 the
results of thresholding and smoothing are very
similar, but by looking closely you can see some
small differences around the holes, which indicates
that the latter technique should be used. More
specifically, the aim of image smoothing is to
enhance the resolution of camera images, therefore
will be the primary image processing algorithm
followed by thresholding.

Fig. 10. Deciding which step is better at first smoothing then
thresholding (a) or thresholding then smoothing (b)
The purpose of this process is to specify two
defects (Burn Through) in the film so it is possible
to segment the objects in the image. Segmentation
refers to the operation of partitioning an image into
component parts or into separate object so that only
the defects are visible. One of the most prevalent
uses of segmentation is thresholding which has
different uses; single thresholding, double
thresholding, adaptive thresholding and global
thresholding. This image was chosen since it was
needed to threshold by means of histogram
computing, and global thresholding. By using
thresholding all of the pixels in an image change to
either 0 (black) or 1 (white). The threshold in this
image is 0.3882, which means that all of the pixels
under 0.3882 become 0 and all pixels above 0.3882
become 1.
Step two, Morphology operation
The next step is to use Morphology operations,
for continuing image is in Figure 10. First the
boundaries of the welds should be connected via a
closing operation. By means of closing operation
the objects connect to each other and fill the holes
in a region, as well as eliminate inlets on the
boundary. See Figure 11.
Fig. 11. Using closing operation (Morphology)
On the other hand, since the closing operation
consists of dilation and then erosion operations
dilation was used as well (Figure 12).
Fig. 12. Using dilation operation (Morphology)
As you know dilation operation allows objects
to expand, connects disjoint objects and enlarges a
region which we need here. The results from
Figures 11 and 12 show, it is appropriate to dilate
the image only to erode it (do not use closing
operation). This is because eroding the image the
boundary will shrink the right hole and get a bad
result. After using many other morphology
operations such as erosion, opening, closing, and
skeletonisation, it was found that using a closing
operation after dilation yield’s a positive result
(Figure 13).
Fig. 13. Using closing operation after Figure 12
Step three, Smoothing
As Figure 13 shows, the edges of the cap are
much unshaped and another command should be
used to clean it. So image smoothing has been used
again to solve this problem; however there are
several types of smoothing such as average, disk,
Gaussian, laplacian, log, motion, prewitt, sobel,
unsharp, that can be utilised. After visual testing
and examining of them, the most efficient one will
be chosen and the best result will be achieved. See
Figure 14. In this step, the edge was examined for
specifying which holes a programme had to be
written for by means of edge function. It also tested
different types of edges such as sobel, prewitt,
roberts, canny and zerocross. The best one, which
was sobel, did not give suitable result (Figure 15).
Fig. 14. Using smoothing, disk type after Figure 13
Fig. 15. Using edge function
Step four, Boundary functions
After testing is completed a boundary should be
drawn around the holes to specify defects. Before
identifying the boundaries, the black and white
pixels should be reserved, since the boundary
function can detect white regions only and the
specified regions are black (Figure 16).
 Fig. 16. Convert the black and white pixels to each other

By writing boundary functions in the software it

is possible to get all of the holes in the image
however the problem is that the computer will
recognise the two big spaces in two sides of holes
as objects and draw boundary around them as well
(Figure 17).
In Figure 17 the software recognises four holes.
One positive solution is to introduce the two
specified holes to the computer for obtaining the
boundary. In order to do this, labelling commands
Fig. 19. Processed image of radiographic film of Burn Through
V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND
DISCUSSION
This part has illustrated the final results, written
by MATLAB software, by comparing the primary
images via visual inspection. Likewise, more
images will be processed to show that different
images can be processed by the same program.
Here, radiographic films with several specific
defects have been shown.

A. Burn Through
As it has been shown in the first part of the
process as well as these images, it is possible to
achieve the best solution and reduce the time. In
the last image (c) the two cavities in the pipe are
marked by the red circles (Figure 20).

Fig. 17. Getting boundary (not acceptable result)

have been used. By means of this function all four

holes will be separated and then function label 2
and 3 will be added to each other. See the result in
Figure 18.

Fig. 18. Adding label 2 and 3 from Figure 17

Fig. 20. Burn Through
When the boundary functions are written, it
would just specify the two holes. Figure 19
indicates the boundaries by showing the original
image.
 B. Lack of Penetration (LOP)
Fig. 21. Lack of Penetration (LOP)
C. Lack of Fusion (LOF)
Fig. 22. Lack of Fusion (LOF)
Fig. 23. Lack of Fusion (LOF)
D. Slag
One of the major problems in film are the many
different possible interpretations of each observer.
Each interpreter has their own idea and although
most of the time the interpretations are the same,
some complex films interpreters have different
thoughts.
Moreover, manual interpreting takes a lot of
time. This means that a qualified interpreter should
watch the film carefully, recognise the defects and
write report of it.
Fig. 24. Slag
Regarding the programs that we should write
for the computer, the images will be processed and
recognised so that we know type and distance of
each image.
As a final point, it is interesting to note that by
designing this program the films would be
interpreted automatically along with detailed
computer reports. Regarding the advantages of this
idea, we can save time and, increase accuracy, as
that it has been mentioned above.
VI. Conclusion
Taking everything into consideration, the aim
of this paper was to show that image processing has
been done for some radiographic films and the
related defects have been specified in each image
by this process. As it had been shown before, they
have been done by some prevalent operations in
image processing such as point processing,
filtering, image smoothing, edge detection,
segmentation (using thresholding), boundary
tracing, region labeling, and Morphology
operations. These functions lead us to write the
program which takes the image as an input and
gives the defects and their details as an output.
(Pudney, 1998)
A method has been developed to detect the
defect in the weld. Using the radiographic images
for this digital image, several image processing
algorithms were applied and the system has been
validated by visual judgment. Finally the result is
very encouraging and shows the potential use of
the system for more application in the field of weld
inspection.
To sum up, by developing the technology in
industries and considering that everything has been
changing daily, we should find solutions for saving
time and keeping accuracy in each process. It is
obvious that the conclusion vision and image
processing can have a bright future in weld
inspection. In order to achieve this, digital image
processing is definitely one of the most critical
technologies for solving numerous problems that
human face with in reality.

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