TY - JOUR A1 - Ahmadi, Samim A1 - Kästner, L. A1 - Hauffen, Jan Christian A1 - Jung, P. A1 - Ziegler, Mathias T1 - Photothermal-SR-Net: A Customized Deep Unfolding Neural Network for Photothermal Super Resolution Imaging JF - IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement N2 - This article presents deep unfolding neural networks to handle inverse problems in photothermal radiometry enabling super-resolution (SR) imaging. The photothermal SR approach is a well-known technique to overcome the spatial resolution limitation in photothermal imaging by extracting high-frequency spatial components based on the deconvolution with the thermal point spread function (PSF). However, stable deconvolution can only be achieved by using the sparse structure of defect patterns, which often requires tedious, handcrafted tuning of hyperparameters and results in computationally intensive algorithms. On this account, this article proposes Photothermal-SR-Net, which performs deconvolution by deep unfolding considering the underlying physics. Since defects appear sparsely in materials, our approach includes trained block-sparsity thresholding in each convolutional layer. This enables to super-resolve 2-D thermal images for nondestructive testing (NDT) with a substantially improved convergence rate compared to classic approaches. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated on various deep unfolding and thresholding approaches. Furthermore, we explored how to increase the reconstruction quality and the computational performance. Thereby, it was found that the computing time for creating high-resolution images could be significantly reduced without decreasing the reconstruction quality by using pixel binning as a preprocessing step. KW - Deep unfolding KW - Defect reconstruction KW - Elastic net KW - Inverse problems KW - Iterative shrinkage thresholding KW - Neural network KW - Nondestructive testing (NDT) KW - Photothermal imaging KW - Super resolution (SR) KW - Thermography PY - 2022 DO - https://doi.org/10.1109/tim.2022.3154803 SN - 1557-9662 VL - 71 SP - 1 EP - 9 PB - IEEE AN - OPUS4-54678 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -