TY - CONF A1 - Ziegler, Mathias A1 - Thiel, Erik A1 - Ahmadi, Samim T1 - Lock-in Thermography using High-Power Laser Sources N2 - Optical lock-in thermography is a completely contactless and very sensitive NDT technique. As an optical source of energy, incandescent lamps are most commonly used because they are relatively inexpensive and offer high irradiances at the test specimen. However, they are strongly restricted by their low modulation bandwidth with a maximum modulation frequency of only about 1 Hz. The use of high-power kilowattclass laser sources, e.g. diode laser arrays, pushes this constraint beyond 100 Hz. This allows for the exploration of the near-surface region of metals and layer systems with better and more accurate penetration depth and depth resolution. Moreover, these lasers are virtually free of any additional thermal radiation that could interfere with the “true” thermal response emitted from the heated sample. In turn, they can be easily used in a one-sided test configuration. We present current activities with kilowatt-class highpower laser sources for advanced lock-in thermography and focus on the application of laser arrays that offer a very high irradiation strength over a large sample area beyond the mentioned advantages. T2 - 12th European Conference on Non-destructive Testing CY - Gothenburg, Sweden DA - 11.06.2018 KW - Thermography KW - Laser Thermography KW - Lock-in Thermography PY - 2018 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-454466 UR - http://cdn.ecndt2018.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/ecndt-0139-2018.pdf SN - 978-91-639-6217-2 SP - ECNDT-0139-2018,1 EP - 7 AN - OPUS4-45446 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - CONF A1 - Burgholzer, P. A1 - Berer, T. A1 - Ziegler, Mathias A1 - Thiel, Erik A1 - Ahmadi, Samim A1 - Gruber, J. A1 - Mayr, G. A1 - Hendorfer, G. T1 - Blind structured illumination as excitation for super-resolution photothermal radiometry N2 - Using an infrared camera for radiometric imaging allows the contactless temperature measurement of multiple surface pixels simultaneously. From the measured surface data, a sub-surface structure, embedded inside a sample or tissue, can be reconstructed and imaged when heated by an excitation light pulse. The main drawback in radiometric imaging is the degradation of the spatial resolution with increasing depth, which results in blurred images for deeper lying structures. We circumvent this degradation with blind structured illumination, combined with a non-linear joint sparsity reconstruction algorithm. The ground-breaking concept of super-resolution can be transferred from optics to thermographic imaging. T2 - Conference QIRT 2018 CY - Berlin, Germany DA - 25.06.2018 KW - Thermography KW - Laser thermography KW - Super resolution PY - 2018 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-454506 SN - 978-3-940283-94-8 DO - https://doi.org/10.1080/17686733.2019.1655247 SP - We.3.A.2, 1 EP - 7 AN - OPUS4-45450 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ahmadi, Samim A1 - Burgholzer, P. A1 - Mayr, G. A1 - Jung, P. A1 - Caire, G. A1 - Ziegler, Mathias T1 - Photothermal super resolution imaging: A comparison of different thermographic reconstruction techniques N2 - This paper presents different super resolution reconstruction techniques to overcome the spatial resolution limits in thermography. Pseudo-random blind structured illumination from a onedimensional laser array is used as heat source for super resolution thermography. Pulsed thermography measurements using an infrared camera with a high frame rate sampling lead to a huge amount of data. To handle this large data set, thermographic reconstruction techniques are an essential step of the overall reconstruction process. Four different thermographic reconstruction techniques are analyzed based on the Fourier transform amplitude, principal component analysis, virtual wave reconstruction and the maximum thermogram. The application of those methods results in a sparse basis representation of the measured data and serves as input for a compressed sensing based algorithm called iterative joint sparsity (IJOSP). Since the thermographic reconstruction techniques have a high influence on the result of the IJOSP algorithm, this paper Highlights their Advantages and disadvantages. KW - Super resolution KW - Compressed sensing KW - Laser thermography KW - Virtual wave KW - Defect reconstruction PY - 2020 DO - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ndteint.2020.102228 VL - 111 SP - 2228 PB - Elsevier Ltd. CY - Netherlands AN - OPUS4-50419 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - CONF A1 - Ahmadi, Samim A1 - Ziegler, Mathias A1 - Thiel, Erik A1 - Hirsch, Philipp Daniel A1 - Karagianni, Christina A1 - Burgholzer, P. A1 - Mayr, G. A1 - Jung, P. A1 - Caire, G. T1 - Thermal Super Resolution Image Reconstruction Using Structured Laser Heating N2 - The separation of two closely located defects in fields of Thermographic NDE is very challenging. The diffusive nature of thermal waves leads to a fundamental limitation in spatial resolution. Therefore, super resolution image reconstruction can be used. The measured thermal waves can be transformed to virtual (ultrasound) waves that can be processed by applying ultrasound reconstruction algorithms and finally the super resolution algorithm. Otherwise, it is also possible to make use of a Fourier transform with a subsequent super resolution routine. These super resolution thermographic image reconstruction techniques in post-processing are discussed and evaluated regarding performance, accuracy and repeatability. T2 - 7th Autumn School METTI (Thermal Measurements and Inverse Techniques) CY - Porquerolles Island, Hyères, France DA - 29.09.2019 KW - Super resolution KW - Virtual wave KW - Laser thermography KW - VCSEL array KW - Joint sparsity KW - Compressed sensing PY - 2019 AN - OPUS4-49881 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - CONF A1 - Ahmadi, Samim A1 - Ziegler, Mathias A1 - Thiel, Erik A1 - Hirsch, Philipp Daniel A1 - Karagianni, Christina A1 - Burgholzer, P. A1 - Mayr, G. A1 - Jung, P. A1 - Caire, G. T1 - Thermographic super resolution imaging using structured 1D laser illumination N2 - Thermographic nondestructive evaluation (NDE) is based on the interaction of thermal waves with inhomogeneities. These inhomogeneities are related to sample geometry or material composition. Although thermography is suitable for a wide range of inhomogeneities and materials, the fundamental limitation is the diffusive nature of thermal waves and the need to measure their effect radiometrically at the sample surface only. The propagation of the thermal waves from the heat source to the inhomogeneity and to the detection surface results in a degradation in the spatial resolution of the technique. A new concerted ansatz based on a spatially structured heating and a joint sparsity of the signal ensemble allows an improved reconstruction of inhomogeneities. As a first step to establish an improved thermographic NDE method, an experimental setup was built based on structured 1D illumination using a flash lamp behind a mechanical aperture. As a follow-up to this approach, we now use direct structured illumination using a 1D laser array. The individual emitter cells are driven by a pseudo-random binary pattern and are additionally shifted by fractions of the cell period. The repeated measurement of these different configurations enables to illuminate each spot of the sample surface in lateral direction. This allows for a reconstruction that makes use of joint sparsity. The measured data set is processed using super resolution image reconstruction algorithms such as the iterative joint sparsity (IJOSP) algorithm. Using this reconstruction technique and 150 different illumination patterns results in a spatial resolution enhancement of approximately a factor of four compared to the resolution of 5.9 mm for homogenously illuminated thermographic reconstruction. Further, new data processing techniques have been studied before applying the IJOSP algorithm that are more performant or less prone to errors regarding image reconstruction. The choice of regularization parameters in data processing as well as experimental parameters such as the illumination pattern as a variable heat flux density (i.e., the Neumann boundary condition for convolution with the constant Green's function) have a big influence on the reconstruction goodness. With analytical-numerical modelling and numerical FEM simulations, we studied the influence of the experimental parameters on the result of the non-linear IJOSP reconstruction. This has also been investigated experimentally e.g. using different laser line widths or more measurements per position. These studies are used to derive optimal conditions for a certain measurement image reconstruction technique. T2 - 20-th International Conference on Photoacoustic and Photothermal Phenomena CY - Moscow, Russia DA - 07.07.2019 KW - Super resolution KW - Virtual wave KW - Laser thermography KW - 1d laser KW - Joint sparsity KW - Laser array KW - VCSEL array KW - High-power laser PY - 2019 AN - OPUS4-48578 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - 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 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 - TY - INPR 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 N2 - This paper presents deep unfolding neural networks to handle inverse problems in photothermal radiometry enabling super resolution (SR) imaging. Photothermal imaging is a well-known technique in active thermography for nondestructive inspection of defects in materials such as metals or composites. A grand challenge of active thermography is to overcome the spatial resolution limitation imposed by heat diffusion in order to accurately resolve each defect. The photothermal SR approach enables to extract high-frequency spatial components based on the deconvolution with the thermal point spread function. However, stable deconvolution can only be achieved by using the sparse structure of defect patterns, which often requires tedious, hand-crafted tuning of hyperparameters and results in computationally intensive algorithms. On this account, Photothermal-SR-Net is proposed in this paper, which performs deconvolution by deep unfolding considering the underlying physics. This enables to super resolve 2D thermal images for nondestructive testing with a substantially improved convergence rate. Since defects appear sparsely in materials, Photothermal-SR-Net applies trained blocksparsity thresholding to the acquired thermal images in each convolutional layer. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated and discussed using various deep unfolding and thresholding approaches applied to 2D thermal images. Subsequently, studies are conducted on how to increase the reconstruction quality and the computational performance of Photothermal-SR-Net is evaluated. 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 - Photothermal super resolution KW - Nondestructive testing KW - Deep unfolding KW - Deep learning KW - Deep imaging KW - Physics-based deep learning KW - Laser thermography KW - Elastic net KW - Iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm PY - 2021 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-525371 DO - https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2104.10563 SN - 2331-8422 SP - 1 EP - 10 PB - Cornell University CY - Ithaca, NY AN - OPUS4-52537 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - INPR A1 - Ahmadi, Samim A1 - Lecompagnon, Julien A1 - Hirsch, Philipp Daniel A1 - Burgholzer, P. A1 - Jung, P. A1 - Caire, G. T1 - Laser excited super resolution thermal imaging for nondestructive inspection of internal defects N2 - A photothermal super resolution technique is proposed for an improved inspection of internal defects. To evaluate the potential of the laser-based thermographic technique, an additively manufactured stainless steel specimen with closely spaced internal cavities is used. Four different experimental configurations in transmission, reflection, stepwise and continuous scanning are investigated. The applied image post-processing method is based on compressed sensing and makes use of the block sparsity from multiple measurement events. This concerted approach of experimental measurement strategy and numerical optimization enables the resolution of internal defects and outperforms conventional thermographic inspection techniques. KW - Super resolution KW - Photothermal KW - Imaging KW - Compressed sensing KW - Internal defects KW - Nondestructive testing PY - 2020 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-518866 DO - https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2007.03341 SN - 2331-8422 SP - 1 EP - 9 PB - Cornell University CY - Ithaca, NY AN - OPUS4-51886 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - CONF A1 - Ahmadi, Samim A1 - Ziegler, Mathias A1 - Thiel, Erik A1 - Hirsch, Philipp Daniel A1 - Karagianni, Christina A1 - Burgholzer, P. A1 - Mayr, G. A1 - Jung, P. A1 - Caire, G. T1 - Photothermal super resolution imaging: a comparison of different reconstruction techniques N2 - The diffusive nature of heat propagation complicates the separation of two closely spaced defects. This results in a fundamental limitation in spatial resolution. Therefore, super resolution (SR) image reconstruction can be used. SR processing techniques based on spatially structured heating and joint sparsity of the signal ensemble allows for an improved reconstruction of closely spaced defects. This new technique has been studied using a 1D laser array with randomly chosen illumination pattern. This paper presents the results after applying SR algorithms such as the iterative joint sparsity (IJOSP) algorithm, to our processed measurement data. Two different data processing strategies are evaluated and discussed regarding their influence on the reconstruction goodness as well as their complexity. Moreover, the degradation of the SR reconstruction by the choice of regularization parameters in data processing is discussed. The application of both SR techniques that are evaluated in this paper results in a spatial resolution enhancement of approximately a factor of four which leads to a better separation of two closely spaced defects. The fundamental difference between both SR techniques is their complexity. T2 - 46th Annual Review of Profress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation CY - Portland, OR, USA DA - 14.07.2019 KW - Super resolution KW - Virtual wave KW - Laser thermography KW - 1d laser KW - Joint sparsity KW - Laser array KW - VCSEL array KW - High-power laser KW - Fourier transform KW - Dimension reduction PY - 2019 AN - OPUS4-48579 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hauffen, J. C. A1 - Kästner, L. A1 - Ahmadi, Samim A1 - Jung, P. A1 - Caire, G. A1 - Ziegler, Mathias T1 - Learned block iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm for photothermal super resolution imaging N2 - Block-sparse regularization is already well known in active thermal imaging and is used for multiple-measurement-based inverse problems. The main bottleneck of this method is the choice of regularization parameters which differs for each experiment. We show the benefits of using a learned block iterative shrinkage thresholding algorithm (LBISTA) that is able to learn the choice of regularization parameters, without the need to manually select them. In addition, LBISTA enables the determination of a suitable weight matrix to solve the underlying inverse problem. Therefore, in this paper we present LBISTA and compare it with state-of-the-art block iterative shrinkage thresholding using synthetically generated and experimental test data from active thermography for defect reconstruction. Our results show that the use of the learned block-sparse optimization approach provides smaller normalized mean square errors for a small fixed number of iterations. Thus, this allows us to improve the convergence speed and only needs a few iterations to generate accurate defect reconstruction in photothermal super-resolution imaging. KW - Thermography KW - Laser KW - Machine learning KW - Optimization KW - Non-destructive testing KW - NDT KW - Neural network KW - Defect reconstruction KW - Block-sparsity KW - Active thermal imaging KW - Regularization KW - Laser thermography PY - 2022 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-554598 DO - https://doi.org/10.3390/s22155533 SN - 1424-8220 VL - 22 IS - 15 SP - 1 EP - 15 PB - MDPI CY - Basel AN - OPUS4-55459 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -