No abstract

Pulsed eddy current (PEC) thermography is an emerging method in the field of non-destructive testing and evaluation (NDT&E). Defects can be characterized by tracking the diffusion of heat in a sample through the analysis of a sequence of PEC thermographic images. This study takes advantage of the capabilities of PEC thermography to gain quantitative information about complex geometrical defects, i.e. angular defect characterization through the analysis of the surface thermal distribution. To conduct the analysis, a new approach using a normalized cross-correlation technique is proposed. The strength of the proposed approach lies in its ability to track the heat diffusion through sequential PEC thermographic images in a metallic sample. The results of the analysis are used to determine the dimensions of defects in the sample under test. These results have shown the effectiveness of the proposed technique in providing features which have good agreement with defect detection and evaluation.

Electromagnetic imaging is based upon the fundamentals of electromagnetic (EM) fields and their relationship with the material properties under evaluation. A new system based on a Giant Magneto-Resistive (GMR) sensor array was built to capture the scattered EM signal returned by metallic objects. This paper evaluates the new system's capabilities through the classification of metallic objects based on features extracted from their response to EM fields. A novel amplitude variation feature as well as the combinations of typical features is proposed to obtain high classification rates. The selected features of metallic objects are then applied to well-known supervised classifiers (ANN and SVM) to detect and classify 'threat' items. A collection of handguns with other commonly used metallic objects are tested. Promising results show that a high classification rate is achieved using the proposed new combination features and classification framework. This novel procedure has the potential to produce significant improvements in automatic weapon detection and classification.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones have made great progress in aerial surveys to research and discover heritage sites and archaeological areas, particularly after having developed their technical capabilities to carry various sensors onboard, whether they are conventional cameras, multispectral cameras, and thermal sensors. The objective of this research is to use the drone technology and k-mean clustering algorithm for the first time in Nineveh Governorate in Iraq to reveal the extent of civil excesses and random construction, as well as the looting and theft that occur in the archaeological areas. DJI Phantom 4 Pro drone was used, in addition to using the specialized Pix4D program to process drone images and make mosaics for them. Multiple flights were performed using a drone to survey multiple locations throughout the area and compare them with satellite images during different years. Drone’s data classification was implemented using a k-means clustering algorithm. The results of the data classification for three different time periods indicated that the percentage of archaeological lands decreased from 90.31% in 2004 to 25.29% in 2018. Where the work revealed the extent of the archaeological area’s great violations. The study also emphasized the importance of directing authorities of local antiquities to ensure the use of drone’s technology to obtain statistical and methodological reports periodically to assess archaeological damage and to avoid overtaking, stolen and looted of these sites.

The expansion of biometric applications and databases is worrying. Processing extensive or sophisticated biometric data results in longer wait times, which might restrict application usefulness. This work focuses on accelerating the processing of biometric data and proposes a parallel method of data processing that exceeds the capabilities of a central processing unit (CPU). The combination of the graphics processing unit (GPU) and compute unified device architecture (CUDA) results in at least three times the processing speed of a published accurate and secure multimodal biometric system. The GPU-assisted approach beats the CPU-only implementation when saturating the CPU-only performance with more people than the available thread count. The GPU-assisted solution is also proven to have the same accuracy as the original system, indicating accuracy and processing performance improvements in the demanding big data environment.