Ultrasonics 42 (2004) 847–851

www.elsevier.com/locate/ultras

Ultrasonic flaw detection in NDE of highly scattering materials

using wavelet and Wigner–Ville transform processing
a,*
M.A. Rodr
ıguez , J.L. San Emeterio b, J.C. L

azaro c, A. Ramos b

a
ETSI Telecomunicaci
on, Universidad Polit
ecnica de Valencia, Camino de Vera s/n, 46022 Valencia, Spain
b
Instituto de Ac
ustica, CSIC, Calle Serrano 144, 28006 Madrid, Spain
c
ETSI Inform
atica, UNED, Calle Juan del Rosal 16, 28040 Madrid, Spain

Abstract

In ultrasonic non-destructive evaluation of highly scattering materials the backscattering noise may attain peak values greater
than the searched flaw pulse and the mean value of noise spectrum is very similar to the searched echo spectrum. Several specific
methods have been proposed for the reduction of this type of noise, but the comparison of the performance of different methods is
still an open problem. In this paper, we make a comparison among some methods based on simultaneous representations in time
and frequency/scale domains of the ultrasonic traces. Synthetic and experimental traces are de-noised using a discrete wavelet
processor with decomposition level-dependent threshold selection and a method that combines Wigner–Ville transform and filtering
in the time–frequency domain. The results are comparatively evaluated in terms of signal to noise ratio and probability of detection.
Ó 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Ultrasonic NDE; Grain noise reduction; Wavelet; Wigner–Ville transform

1. Introduction fibre reinforced plastic composite block with artificial

The precise detection of echographic pulses buried in
coherent noise is a problem of major importance in
ultrasonic non-destructive testing. In order to reduce
this type of noise, several methods have been proposed
including split-spectrum processing, wavelet transform
processing, and techniques based on time–frequency
distributions [1–7].
In this paper, a discrete wavelet processor with
decomposition level-dependent threshold selection and a
method that combines Wigner–Ville transform (WVT)
and filtering in the time–frequency domain are used for
noise reduction and for detection of a single ultrasonic
flaw echo contaminated by coherent grain noise. Syn-
thetic noise registers with an incrusted flaw signal have
been processed using both methods. These synthetic
ultrasonic traces have been generated by using a fre-
quency domain model that includes frequency depen-
dent material attenuation and frequency dependent
scattering. In addition, some experimental pulse-echo
NDT traces, obtained from the inspection of a carbon
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: +34-9638-79309.
E-mail address: marodrig@upvnet.upv.es (M.A. Rodr
ıguez).
flat-bottom holes, have been processed. The results
provided by the specific Wavelet and Wigner–Ville
processors used in this work are comparatively evalu-
ated in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and prob-
ability of detection (PD).
2. Synthetic and experimental ultrasonic traces
Synthetic noise registers are frequently used for the
evaluation of signal processing algorithms. In this paper
we use a previously developed structural noise model [8].
Single scattering, frequency dependent material attenu-
ation, frequency dependent scattering, and a Gaussian
distribution of the scatters are assumed. The received
signal Y ðf Þ, including the flaw echo and noise, is mod-
eled in the frequency domain as
Y ðf Þ ¼ ððA expðj2pf sD Þ þ N1 ðf Þf 2 ÞH ðf ÞÞ
 expða0 f 4 Þ þ N2 ðf Þ ð1Þ
where f is frequency, H ðf Þ is the transmit–receive fre-
quency response of the piezoelectric ultrasonic trans-
ducer, N1 ðf Þ represents the scatters distribution which
produces the grain noise, and a0 is the attenuation

0041-624X/$ - see front matter Ó 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.ultras.2004.01.063
848 M.A. Rodr
ıguez et al. / Ultrasonics 42 (2004) 847–851

6
0.4 (a)
(a)
4
0.2
2

0 0
-2
-0.2
-4

-6 -0.4

80 1
(b) (b)
0.8
60
0.6
40
0.4
20 0.2

0 0

3 0.4
(c) (c)
2
0.2
1

0 0
-1
-0.2
-2
-0.4
-3
0.4
1.5 (d)
(d)
1
0.2
0.5

0 0
-0.5

-1 -0.2

-1.5

1
(e) 0.1 (e)

0.5
0.05

0 0

-0.5 -0.05

-1 -0.1
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 0 5 10 15 20
Time (µs)
Time (µs)
Fig. 2. Experimental ultrasonic trace (a) and results of signal pro-
Fig. 1. Initial synthetic trace (a) and results of signal processing: with
WVT (b), with wavelet SURE (c), with wavelet MINIMAX (d) and cessing: with WVT (b), with wavelet SURE (c), with wavelet MINI-
MAX (d) and with wavelet kk (k ¼ 3) method (e).
with wavelet kk (k ¼ 3) method (e).

coherent noise received from the flaw region is assumed

factor. The noise generated by the scatters presents a to be slightly lesser than in the absence of flaw [9] and
frequency band very similar to the echo one. The this is implemented by means of a temporal Gaussian
 M.A. Rodr
ıguez et al. / Ultrasonics 42 (2004) 847–851
window. N2 ðf Þ is additional Gaussian white noise which
can be related to the ultrasonic and measurement sys-
tems. The flaw echo is modeled as a reflection arriving at
time sD by means of the delayed delta function, with A
as a weighting factor. Several parameters in this model
permit its tuning to different inspection conditions.
Noise registers in this work have been generated with a
sampling frequency fs ¼ 64 MS/s, attenuation factor
a0 ¼ 1:8  1026 s4 and N ¼ 4096 points. Coherent and
white noises normalized in amplitude have been added.
The flaw signal of amplitude determined by A is added at
the central position of the noise register, being A ¼ F =rn
where rn is the standard deviation of the particular noise
register and F is an index of the input SNR. Several sets
of 500 ultrasonic traces with the factor F varying from 2
to 4 have been generated in this way. In particular, 8 sets
of 500 traces have been generated with F ¼ 2, 2.5, 2.75,
3, 3.25, 3.5 3.75 and 4. Fig. 1a is an example of a syn-
thetic ultrasonic trace generated with an amplitude given
by F ¼ 2:5.
Several experimental signals were acquired from a
carbon fibre reinforced plastic (CFRP) composite block
with flat-bottom holes using a Panametrics transducer
(310S) of 5 MHz and the Panametrics Ultrasonic Ana-
lyser 5052UA [8]. The ultrasonic traces were acquired by
means of a digital oscilloscope, Tektronix TDS 744 of
2GS/s, and data length of 5000 samples, which were
transferred via GPIB to a computer. Fig. 2a shows one
of these experimental traces.
3. Algorithm description
Time-frequency and time-scale methods provide a
two-dimensional representation of signals in both time
and frequency domains, noting that scale is directly
related to frequency. This representation permits to
simultaneously exploit the time and the frequency
characteristics of the NDE ultrasonic signals which are
of finite duration and band limited.
3.1. Wigner–Ville transform processing
WVT is a quadratic transform with important prop-
erties for ultrasonic applications: time–frequency con-
stant resolution and high energy concentration. The
general definition of the WVT of a signal xðtÞ is [10]
Z 1 
s  s  j2pf s
WVTx ðt; f Þ ¼ xa t þ xa t  e ds ð2Þ
1 2 2
where xa ðtÞ is the analytic signal of xðtÞ.
The processing begins with the analytic signal calcu-
lation of the trace by using the Hilbert transform. After
this the Wigner–Ville representation is obtained by using
the Boashash method [11]. In the following step, a fil-
tering in the time–frequency domain is performed, try-
849
ing to select and emphasize the relevant frequency
content of the searched echo. The process is based in the
differences that exist between the time–frequency shape
of the echo-pulse and the grain noise one. The echo
produces a regular representation in time and frequency
while the noise is more irregular, although the mean
shapes of the echo and the coherent noise are very
similar. In addition, the echo presents an interesting
property in the Wigner–Ville domain: in most of the
cases it is positive for any pair of time–frequency values.
Common ultrasonic pulses can be modeled by a kind of
functions which produce positive WVT’s [12], while the
noise does not belong to this kind of functions and its
WVT produces positive and negative values. Thus, by
means of the suppression of the parts with negative
values in the WVT, the noise influence is attenuated [7].
The signal reconstruction can be done with a simple sum
in the frequency axis after the attenuation of the noise
components. The WVT does not preserve phase infor-
mation, thus the reconstructed signal is related to the
original signal envelope.
3.2. Wavelet transform processing
The wavelet transform Ws ða; bÞ of a signal xðtÞ is given
by
Z 1  
tb
Ws ða; bÞ ¼ xðtÞW dt ð3Þ
1 a
where Wð Þ is the mother wavelet and a, b the dilatation
and translation coefficients respectively.
Wavelet de-noising procedures can be summarized as
(i) wavelet transform of the noisy register; (ii) pruning
and/or thresholding of the coefficients in the trans-
formed domain; (iii) reconstruction of the de-noised
signal by inverse transform.
In previous works [4,8,9], the influence of several
processing parameters for grain noise reduction has
been studied. In this work we use Daubechies [13] DB6
as mother wavelet, soft type and level dependent thres-
holding. Three methods for threshold value selection are
used [14]. Each method is independently applied to each
decomposition level. SURE and Minimax threshold
selection rules are described in reference [15]. An alter-
native threshold selection rule, previously proposed [9],
is also used. This new threshold kki is determined from
the mean and standard deviation of the squared wavelet
coefficients
X
Ni
kki ¼ ðli þ ksi Þ1=2 ; li ¼ x2ij =Ni ;
j¼1
X
Ni
s2i ¼ ðx2ij  li Þ2 =ðNi  1Þ ð4Þ
j¼1
where i is the decomposition level.
850 M.A. Rodr
ıguez et al. / Ultrasonics 42 (2004) 847–851

In this work, this kki threshold has been used with
k ¼ 3, and applied to the two scales with the maximum
average of the squared coefficients. The remaining detail
decomposition levels are pruned.
4. Simulation results
Several sets of synthetic traces generated as described
previously have been de-noised using the described
Wigner–Ville and Wavelet processors. Nine sets of 500
traces, characterized by the factor of amplitude F , have
been processed (including F ¼ 0, without ultrasonic flaw
signal). The results have been evaluated by means of two
parameters: SNR and PD.
The SNR is defined as the quotient of the peak value
of the trace determined in a time window around the
zone of the trace where the signal was incrusted (target
zone) divided by the standard deviation of the whole
trace. This target time window is centred with the in-
crusted signal and has a length double of this signal. The
same definition is used for the raw input traces and the
output processed traces:
peak value target zone
SNR ¼
trace standard deviation
This SNR definition, which is a good measure of per-
formance when a single flaw is present, is similar to the
definition used in [2,3,6]. In these works, the standard
deviation of the trace excluding the flaw or target region
was used as the denominator in Eq. (5). Nevertheless,
when the de-noising procedure is very severe the trace
portion outside the flaw region may provide a very small
standard deviation and therefore the obtained SNR can
be abnormally high. For this reason, the standard
deviation of the whole trace is used in this work.
The PD is estimated as the quotient of the number of
traces exceeding a given threshold with the total number
of traces. In our case, as the total number of cases in
each set is 500, we obtain the PD values with an accu-
racy of ±0.2%. The thresholds are selected and calcu-
lated using the standard deviation of the traces by means
of the expression:
threshold ¼ C trace standard deviation ð6Þ
where C is a constant that varies between 0.1 and 10
with increments of 0.1, and determinates the selectivity
of the final detection.
Table 1 shows the SNR mean values obtained after
processing each set of traces using the different methods.
Each set is identified by the amplitude factor F in the
first column. The SNR of the initial (non-processed) sets
of traces are shown in column 2. Columns 3–6 show the
SNR obtained after processing. It can be noticed that
Wigner–Ville and Wavelet processors using SURE and
Minimax threshold selection rules produce similar re-
sults, with Wigner–Ville slightly better in all cases.
Minimax performs slightly better than SURE for high
initial SNR. In all cases the new proposed threshold
selection rule [9], based on the energy of the wavelet
coefficients in the transform domain, performs notably
better.
Fig. 3 shows the PD computed for the sets of traces
with F ¼ 2:5, 3, 3.5 and 4. The PD of initial (non-pro-
cessed) traces are also shown. A clear correlation can be
observed between the results obtained by using SNR
and PD as evaluation indexes.
ð5Þ
5. Conclusions
Several sets of 500 ultrasonic traces contaminated
with coherent grain noise have been processed using
time–frequency and time-scale transforms. In the case of
discrete wavelet transform processing, different param-
eters (mother wavelet, type of thresholding, decompo-
sition level, threshold selection rule) determinate the
performance of the de-noising procedure. In this work,
DB6, soft thresholding, maximum decomposition level
12, and level dependent thresholds have been used. In
the case of WVT processing a single flaw echo is pro-
cessed and cross-terms do not perturb the results as in
the case of multiple echo location. Results summarized
in Table 1 for mean values of SNR show that for
wavelet processing, SURE and Minimax threshold
selection rules produce similar results, Minimax being

Table 1
Comparison of mean values of SNR of initial and processed ultrasonic traces
Factor F Initial Wigner–Ville Wavelet SURE Wavelet Minimax Wavelet kk (k ¼ 3)
0 3.2212 3.8342 3.7701 3.7861 3.9095
2 3.5768 5.0989 4.5946 4.4225 6.6394
2.5 3.8420 5.9036 5.1590 5.0105 8.1376
2.75 4.0076 6.3166 5.5219 5.3973 8.7953
3 4.1891 6.7030 5.9090 5.8355 9.3678
3.25 4.3853 7.0477 6.2887 6.3000 9.8064
3.5 4.5881 7.3353 6.6436 6.7967 10.194
3.75 4.7967 7.5556 6.9414 7.2519 10.501
4 5.0086 7.7170 7.2251 7.6212 10.679
 M.A. Rodr
ıguez et al. / Ultrasonics 42 (2004) 847–851 851

1 slightly better for high initial SNR. Wigner–Ville pro-

(a)
cessing performs slightly better than the previous ones in
0.8 all cases. The new threshold selection method, based on
the energy of the wavelet coefficients, performs the best
0.6 in all cases with a notable SNR enhancement. The re-
sults displayed in Fig. 3 for the different curves of PD
0.4 present a close correlation with the results for SNR,
showing the same tendencies. Further work is needed to
0.2 check the tendencies presented in this paper with other
processing parameters. Other performance comparisons
0 of methods for grain noise reduction have been previ-
ously presented [5,16], but additional work is also nee-
1 ded to complete the analysis of the efficiency of different
(b)
algorithms.
0.8

0.6
Acknowledgements
0.4
This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry
of Science and Technology (R&D Project DPI2002-
0.2
00441) and CYTED-CNPq (Research Project PUL-
SETS).
0

1
(c)
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