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Multi - Class welding flaws classification using texture feature for

radiographic images

Conference Paper · January 2014

DOI: 10.1109/ICAEE.2014.6838443

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 Multi - Class Welding Flaws Classification using
Texture Feature for Radiographic Images
Jayendra Kumar, R.S. Anand, S.P. Srivastava
Department of Electrical Engineering,
Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee,
Roorkee, India
jkumar.ece@nitjsr.ac.in, anandfee@iitr.ac.in, satyafee@iitr.ac.in
Abstract—The paper presents a novel approach for multi-
class weld flaw classification by means of Gray level co-
occurrence matrix (GLCM) based texture feature extraction
technique and Artificial Neural Network classifier. The weld
radiography films have been digitized using CCD camera,
followed by image processing techniques i.e. RGB to gray
conversion, region of interest (ROI) selection, noise reduction and
contrast enhancement. Subsequently a set of 8, 64 and 44 texture
features vectors have been obtained from each of the digitized
weld images by means of GLCM. Further, the features obtained
have been classified with cascade-forward back propagation
neural network. The proposed system has obtained overall
classification accuracy of 86.10% for nine different types of weld
flaws of digitized radiographic images.
Keywords—GLCM; multi-class classification; weld flaws;
texture feature; neural network; radiographic images;
I. INTRODUCTION
Welding is considered to be the backbone of many fast
growing sectors such as nuclear reactors, shipping industry,
chemical plants and aeronautics. The detection of weld flaws is
a vital task for non-destructive testing of welded material. For
this purpose radiographic testing is the most commonly
preferred technique, as it generates a physical record of
inspection in the form of radiographic film. Radiography is a
well established technique, which looks out for the defects if
any, present inside the material. The efficiency of this process
depends on the operating skills of the technicians.
Machine vision technology has to play a vital role in the
development of Automatic identification and classification of
radiographic images of weld. The research for the development
of an automatic or semi automatic system of weld flaws
(defects) classification using radiographic images of weld
joints has grown considerably in the last 10 years. An image
processing approach has been used by D. Mery et al.[1], for
automatic detection of welding defects from digitized
radiographic films based on two types of widely known texture
features extraction techniques, co-occurrence matrices and 2D
Gabor functions. A study of nonlinear classifier using Artificial
Neural Network (ANN) was implemented by Silva et al.[2],
concluded that the quality of the extracted features are more
important than the quantity of the features. Further, in the year
2005, Da Silva et al.[3] have proposed a methodology to
estimate the classification accuracy of nonlinear classifier to
classify the 6 different types of weld defects of radiographic
images with classification accuracy of 80.00% using ANN.
Researcher[4] have proposed a study on multi- class pattern
classification and compared six different neural network
system architectures. Zapata et al. proposed a methodology for
the extraction of 12 geometrical features from radiographic
weld images, but have used eccentricity, orientation, equivalent
diameter and solidity features to give input to the classifier.
The classification accuracy of 78.9% and 82.6 % have been
reported using ANN and ANFIS, respectively by using above
mentioned four features [5]. Further, they have proposed the
use of ANN classifier with diverse architectures for the input
and hidden layer, to raise the classification accuracy to 80.0%
for the same feature sets [6].
An approach for automatic detection of weld flaws in
radiographic images and classification of the same with the
inclusion of PCA in the input layer of ANN has proposed by
Mirapeix et al.[7]. In 2010, Valavanis et al.[8] have proposed a
SVM and ANN based technique for multiclass weld flaw
detection and classification, by means of geometrical and
texture features of the radiographic images in consideration.
The overall classification accuracy of 85.0% has been reported
by them. In 2012, Hassan et al.[9], have used feed forward
back propagation algorithm to classify only four weld defects
using geometrical features, followed by segmentation with
classification accuracy of 86.0%.
Till date, various researchers have worked on seven
different types of flaws using radiographic images of weld with
different set of descriptors of texture feature, geometrical
measurement and classification methods. In this paper, author
aims to present an approach to develop a methodology to
classify nine different flaws of radiographic weld images that
has not been considered by the researchers so far. The inclusion
of moderate number of descriptor of feature extracted from the
weld images using GLCM and selection of optimum quantity
of neurons in the hidden layer of ANN has used to increase the
classification accuracy of nine different weld flaws.
The article is structured as follows: the proposed
methodology have been discussed in Section II, the
implementation aspect of the weld image flaws classification is
presented in section III, further the results and discussion of the
experimentation are being considered in section IV, and finally
results are concluded in section V.
 II. METHODOLOGY
The block diagram of the proposed methodology for the
classification of radiographic images of weld flaws is as shown
in Fig.1. It consist of digitization of radiographic film, RGB to
gray scale conversion, pre-processing stage, GLCM based
feature extraction and ANN as classifier. Further, each of the
blocks are discussed in detail as follows:
Fig. 1. Block diagram of radiographic weld flaw classification system
A. Digitization of Radiographic film:
After obtaining the radiographic film, the first stage is to
digitize the film for further processing. The most common way
of digitization of radiographic film is to scan it using high
optical density scanner[6], but in this work authors have used
Nikon, 14 megapixel digital camera and white glow board
(generally used by doctor to read X-ray) for digitization of
film. The radiographic film of weld images are positioned on
top of intensity controlled glow board; rest of the part of box is
covered by black paper to reduce the non uniform illumination
effect. Then a digital image of the film is capture through CCD
camera [10]. Further the images are cropped in order to select
the ROI of weld portion for additional processing. The images
obtained thus have size of 2500 x 500 pixels with a resolution
of 300 dpi.
B. RGB to Gray Conversion:
Since, the image are taken by digital camera so the
digitized radiographic weld images are RGB image (24 bit), it
should be converted to gray scale (8 bit image ) for further
processing, in order to save the computation time to extract
texture features.
C. Pre-processing stage:
With a digital image, it is common practice to pre-process
the image in order to shrink or remove the noise and enhance
the contrast level of it. Radiographic film generally has noise
and deficient contrast due to non-uniform illumination and
limited range of intensities of the capturing device [5]. Two
pre-processing steps are applied in this paper: first for dropping
or eliminating noise by an adaptive 5 x 5 Wiener filter.
Secondly, the contrast enhancement has been applied to adjust
the contrast value to a specified range.
D. Feature extraction
After pre-processing the digitized radiographic images, the
features of these images are extracted for further processing.
The feature extraction technique represents a huge reduction of
image size without changing the nature of the image for a
particular application. The output of this stage is a descriptor
for each of the weld defects in the radiographic images. In this
work, the authors have used different set of texture feature
descriptors based on GLCM approach for different experiment
to improve the overall classification accuracy, as well as
individual classification accuracy of different weld flaws.
E. Gray Level Co occurrence Matrices (GLCM) :
Gray level co-occurrence matrix is a common statistical
texture analysis method in which texture features are extracted
by means of statistical approaches from the co-occurrence
matrix[13].Texture descriptors based on GLCM are an well-
organized ways to study the texture of an image. The GLCM
used in the present study is used for a series of second order
statistics calculations. These second order statistics are
calculated for all pair wise combinations of grey levels. In the
present work twenty two texture feature based on study of
Clausi, Soh and Haralick [11, 12, 13] have been used. These
features are energy, entropy, dissimilarity, contrast, inverse
difference, correlation, homogeneity, autocorrelation, cluster
shade, cluster prominence, maximum probability, sum of
square, sum average, sum variance, sum entropy, difference
variance, difference entropy, information measurement of
correlation(1), information measurement of correlation(2),
maximum correlation coefficient, inverse difference
normalized and inverse difference moment normalized.
F. Classification using ANN:
A neural network is made of simple processing units called
neuron. In the proposed scheme, the classification method is a
feature matching method for which ANNs are typically used.
One of the most universal and frequently used ANN learning
algorithms is the back propagation algorithm which is based
on the error energy minimization.
III. IMPLEMENTATION ASPECTS
A. Radiographic Image Database:
Overall 79, radiographic weld images are considered for
this experimentation. The original radiographic films of weld
flaws have been collected from Welding Research Laboratory,
Mechanical Engineering Department, Indian Institute of
Technology, Roorkee, India. The distributions of different
flaws in the database are shown in Fig.2 and digitized image of
each flaws are in Fig.3.
B. Processing Step:
The radiographic weld flaw recognition process in weld
radiography image provide a set of image that belongs to one
of the following classes: gas cavity(GC), lack of
penetration(LOP), porosity(PO), slag inclusion(SI), crack(CR),
lack of fusion(LOF), worm hole(WH) undercut(UC) and non
defect(ND). In order to differentiate each of the weld flaws a
different set of descriptor of GLCM based texture features are
extracted and then used as a input to ANN based multi-class
classifier. Many researchers have used combination of
geometric and texture features for defect classsification. In case,
if the geometrical features are considered, thhen it is of utmost
important to segment the weld defect objeccts, which is time
consuming. In the present work, authors havve concentrated on
various descriptors of GLCM technique with different direction
and spatial pixel distance, to increase the classification
accuracy.
25
No. of samples
IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Three experiments are beeing performed to classify the
radiographic weld flaws into nine different categories. In all the
cases the training, testing andd validation data ratio are 70%,
15% and 15% respectively.
A. Experiment 1:
In the first experiment, fourr texture feature of second order
statistics (contrast, correlation, energy and homogeneity) [13]
are extracted in two direction (0o and 180o) for spatial pixel

20
15 distance d=2 (0,2; 2,0). So thhere are 4x2=8 texture feature
10 descriptors extracted for eachh of the image The data-base
5 utilized in the present study connsist of 79 digitized weld images
with nine different types of o flaws. Based on various
0 experimentation it is observedd that the cascade-forward back
H UC ND
GC LOP PO SI CR LOF WH propagation neural network arrchitecture is most suitable for
classification of flaws in the weld
w images. So the target vector
Name of flaws of size 9x79 and test vector of size
s 79x8 are applied to cascade-
forward back propagation neuural network architecture. The
Fig. 2. Distribution of different flaws in database overall accuracy of classificatioon is 82.3% for one hidden layer
with 146 neurons in that layer. The confusion matrix in Table-I
shows that 87.5% of gas cavitty flaws are classified correctly
whereas 12.5% are misclassiffied as crack. The accuracy of
other flaws like LOP, SI, CR,, UC and ND are 75%, 87.5%,
90.9%, 66.7% and 80% resppectively. The lowest accuracy
Gas cavity(GC) recorded for porosity type of flaws
f is 57.1%. The accuracy of
WH and LOF are recorded as 100% in this case.

TABLE I. CONFUSIION MATRIX FOR ANN-4X2

Lack of penetration(LOP) Classifiication Accuracy %
Flaws
GC LOP PO SI CR LOF WH UC ND
GC 87.5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
LOP 0 75 0 6.2 0 0 0 33.3 0
Porosity(PO) PO 0 0 57.1 0 9.1 0 0 0 0
SI 0 20 42.9 877.5 0 0 0 0 20
CR 12.5 0 0 0 90.9 0 0 0 0
LOF 0 0 0 0 0 100 0 0 0
WH 0 0 0 6.2 0 0 100 0 0
Slag inclusion(SI) UC 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 66.7 0
ND 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 80

B. Experiment 2:
Crack(CR) In the second experiment the t same four texture parameter
of second order statistic are exttracted in four direction (0o, 45o,
90o, 135o) for four different spatial pixel distances d=1,2,3,4
thus sixteen features for eachh parameters are extracted with
Lack of fusion(LOF) pixel value (0,1; 0,2; 0,3; 0,4; -1,1;
- -2,2; -3,3; -4,4; -1,0; -2,0; -
3,0; -4,0; -1,-1; -2,-2; -3,-3; -4,-4). So there are 4x16=64
texture features descriptors which are extracted for each of the
images. Again it is observed that the cascade-forward back
Worm hole(WH) propagation neural network arcchitecture is the most suitable for
classification of flaws in the weld images with the foresaid
features set. So the target vectoor of size 9x79 and test vector of
size 79x64 are applied to neuraal network architecture. Here the
Undercut(UC) overall accuracy of the classifiication is 86.1% for one hidden
layer with 110 neuron in that layer. The confusion matrix for
the same is shown in Table-II. TheT diagonal value of confusion
Non defect(ND) matrix indicates the individual classification rate of each flaws.
In this set of feature classification rate of porosity is again low
Fig. 3. Digitized images of radiographic Weld
W flaws compared to other but higher thhan the previous one.
 TABLE II. CONFUSION MATRIX FOR ANN-4X16 V. CONCLUSION
Classification Accuracy % This work was carried on digitized weld flaws images
Flaws
GC LOP PO SI CR LOF WH UC ND using radiographic film obtained from the Welding Research
GC 87.5 0 0 6.2 0 0 0 0 0
Lab, Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Roorkee,
LOP 0 85 0 6.2 0 0 0 0 0
PO 0 0 71.4 0 9.1 0 0 0 0 India, for the study of multiclass pattern classification using
SI 12.5 15 28.6 81.3 9.1 0 0 0 0 artificial neural network classifier with three different texture
CR 0 0 0 0 81.8 0 0 0 0 feature set having 8, 64, and 44 descriptors of texture features
LOF 0 0 0 0 0 100 0 0 0 of 79 images containing nine types of flaws . From
WH 0 0 0 0 0 0 100 0 0 experimental observation it is concluded that the flaws class
UC 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 100 0 like LOF, WH, PO, UC presents high accuracy of
ND 0 0 0 6.2 0 0 0 0 100
classification with 44 feature set however the GC, LOP, SI
C. Experiment 3: and CR gives moderately low accuracy of classification in all
the three feature sets, whereas, confusion between different
In the third experiment twenty two texture features of
second order statistic discussed in section-II are considered for classes are different in each experiment. The combined
feature extraction in two direction (0o and 180o) for spatial accuracy of classification using three different feature sets on
pixel distance d=2 (0,2; 2,0). Here, total of 22x2=44 texture same data sets are 82.3%, 86.1% and 86.1% respectively.
feature descriptors are extracted from each of the image. Again From Fig.4, it is also clear that recognition rate 100% can be
it is observed that the cascade-forward back propagation neural achieved with the GLCM based texture feature approach.
network architecture is the most suitable for classification of
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Fig. 4. Classification accuracy of different flaws in different experiments

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