A hybrid approach, combining thermographic signal reconstruction (TSR) and pulsed phase thermography (PPT), is proposed and tested for the depth estimation of subsurface defects from pulsed thermographic data. First, TSR is used to obtain the polynomial coefficients from raw data. A synthetic thermogram sequence is then reconstructed from the obtained coefficients. Finally, quantitative PPT is applied to this sequence for defect depth estimation purposes. This combined procedure allows to considerably reduce signal noise, improving depth estimation results as a consequence. A TSR module has been added to an existent graphical user interface (ir_view) to perform these operations.