Microwave Sensor For Imaging Corrosion Under Coatings

Utilizing Pattern Recognition

Abdulbaset Ali, Abdurhman Albasir, and Omar M. Ramahi
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, ON, Canada
oramahi@uwaterloo.ca

Abstract—The problem of detecting corrosion under coating has been
under investigation for a long time where different methods were used.
These methods included pulsed eddy currents, magnetic flux leakage, and
microwaves-based sensing amongst others. This work proposes combining
microwave sensing and artificial intelligence to build a nondestructive
evaluation modality for imaging hidden corrosion underneath coatings
in metallic structures. The response of the microwave sensor for each
scanned position was classified using a binary pattern recognition model
to build black and white images. Resultant images of different materials
under test indicate high imaging lateral resolution.
I. I NTRODUCTION
The corrosion of metallic structure is of high interest to reliability
engineers. As infrastructure ages, the maintenance task becomes more
challenging technically and financially [1]. The problem of metallic
structures corrosion may lead to a greater consequences than simple
metal loss [2]. In some cases, corrosion related issues could result in
injuries, fatalities, environmental hazards, and reduced infrastructure
performance. For example, the National Association of Corrosion
Engineers International (NACE) estimated that the direct cost of
corrosion for 2013 to be higher than $ 1 trillion [3].
Several studies focused on the Non-Destructive Testing (NDT).
These NDT approaches were based on ultrasound, eddy current,
magnetic particle testing, dye penetrant, and visual testing. However,
these technologies face challenges in detecting corrosion under non-
metallic coatings. As coatings increase the lift-off distance between
the sensor and target surface, this increases the difficulty of detecting
underneath corrosion [4]. Therefore, due to the good penetration
property of electromagnetic waves dielectrics, microwave sensing has
been applied to detect corrosion under coatings [4]–[6]. Motivated
by earlier works, we propose a system that combines artificial
intelligence (AI) and microwave sensing. The system is tested using a
numerical simulation study. The sensor was used to test defected and
defect-free metallic plates showing feasibility in practical scenarios.
The sensor used in this study was based on a microstrip transmis-
sion line with a complementary split-ring resonator (CSRR) etched
in the ground plane of a PCB [6] . The transmission line excites the
CSRR structure which acts as an electrically small resonator. Figure.
1-a shows the sensor’s layout, where the red line is the transmission
line on top of a substrate and the green region is the ground plane
on the bottom of the PCB. The sensing region was comprised of
two co-centered split square rings, which form an inductor-capacitor
(L-C) structure that resonated at a 3.75 GHz frequency. The sensor’s
responses of the transmission coefficient magnitude for healthy and
corroded regions are shown in Fig. 1-b. As it can be noticed that there
are two distinctive behaviors, one belongs to a healthy scanned region
(thin line) and the other one to a defected region (thick line). the
sensor’s response (|S21 |) was based on sweeping the frequency(3.25
- 4.2 GHz) with 5MHz increment.
III. DATA P REPROCESSING AND I MPLEMENTED AI M ODEL
Building an AI classifier model, requires training and tuning using
labeled data first, then it becomes ready for unlabeled data during the
test phase. The method used to collect the training dataset was based
on the following simulated models (all simulations were performed
using ANSYS R -HFSSTM ): (1) A healthy Teflon coated metallic plate
was scanned using raster scan. A total of 209 scans/samples were
collected and labeled as a negative class (Y=0). (2) A corroded region
in Teflon coated metallic plate was scanned and a total of 209 positive
sample were collected and labeled as (Y=1). However in this case, the
introduced corrosion was designed to have different depths (0.5mm,
1mm, 2 mm, and 3mm); thus the learned classier would generalize
better for different test scenarios. Figure 2 illustrates the shape of the
corroded plates used for training of the positive class. A total of 418
samples were collected and processed using Principal Component
Analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction.

II. S IMULATION S ETUP AND DATA G ENERATION

Transmission line (copper)

Dielectric substrate

(a) (b)
Ground plane (copper)
Fig. 2: Multi-depth corroded material of (50µm)Teflon coated (a) top
(a) (b) view (b)side view

Fig. 1: (a) Used sensor’s structure. (b) Sensor’s response |S21 | for The data obtained from the sensor is a high dimensional (191-d).
corroded and corrosion-free regions Therefore, PCA was used to reduce the data dimension to 15-d as

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 well as obtaining insight about the nature of the classes’ distributions
through in 2-d space. Since this work is a classification task, it would
be desirable to project the explanatory variables along directions that
are related to the response variable (labels) [7]. To address this issue,
we have applied supervised-PCA and the results are discussed below
in Fig3
1.5

0.5
2 nd Principal Component

0
(a) (b)
-0.5

-1 Fig. 5: Reconstructed images of (50µm)Teflon coated MUTs (a)

-1.5
Corrosion
Testing MUT 1 image (b) Testing MUT 2 image
-2
No Corrosion
-2.5
1 2 3 4 5
st
1 Principal Component

Fig. 3: SPCA 2D Visualization
The support vector machine (SVM) algorithm has become one of
the most effective algorithms for solving problems in classification
and by default SVM is binary classifier which suites this case under
study . An important feature of SVM is that the determination of
the model parameters corresponds to a convex optimization problem,
thus any local solution is also a global optimum [8]. Considering
SVM for classification of a two-class problem using linear models
of the form:
y(x) = W T φ(x) + b (1)
where φ(x) denotes a fixed feature-space transformation and b is
the bias parameter. The implemented SVM classifier was based on
a Matlab interface of Libsvm [9] The SVM classifier achieved high
classification accuracy mainly by optimizing the kernel type, degree,
and termination criterion tolerance. During SVM optimization, the
model showed that polynomial kernel of degree 2 achieved higher
validation accuracy rates than other kernel types.
IV. AI M ODEL T ESTING AND R ESULTS
Two test scenarios were simulated to validate the effectiveness of
the learned AI model. The layout shape of the materials under test
are shown in Fig.4.
(a)
Fig. 4: Testing MUTs (a) MUT with rectangular shape corrosion. (b)
MUT with T shape corrosion
The first MUT was a metallic plate with a single corrosion defect
an area of 15mm×7mm and 1mm depth. A scan of 23mm×23mm
around the defect was made to collect 529 test points were generated.
The second MUT2 was a metallic plate with two corrosion defects
arranged in a T shape and the depth of vertical defect was 1 and the
horizontal defect was 2 mm. The number of generated scans/samples
in this case was 756.
The results shown in Fig. 5 were obtained from SVM classifier
applied on a reduced data. We applied SPCA on the training and test
data sets, and we used the 15 principle components.
V. C ONCLUSION
Using numerical simulation, we demonstrated a corrosion imaging
system that utilizes microwave sensor and Al model. Due to the high
dimensionality of the obtained data, SPCA was used to perform
feature extraction. The AI model was implemented using SVM
because it fits the case of binary classification. The trained AI model
show good generalization on unseen defects in terms of defect shape
characterization and sharp lateral resolution.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was supported in part by the Libyan Ministry of Higher
Education and Scientific Research and the Natural Sciences and
Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). The authors
acknowledge software support provided by CMC Microsystems and
the help of Dr. Ali Ghodsi for implementing the AI model and SPCA.
R EFERENCES
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