“…There is substantial and long-standing interest in the development of statistical methodology and algorithms for the analysis of NDE data (e.g., see Berens and Hovey, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984Gray and Thompson, 1986;Annis and Erland, 1989;Burkel et al, 1996;Hovey and Berens, 1988;Perdijon, 1988aPerdijon, ,b, 1989Neal and Speckman, 1993;Howard and Gilmore, 1994;Sweeting, 1995;Spencer and Schurman, 1995;Olin and Meeker, 1996;Howard et al, 1998;Aoki and Suga, 1999;Zaki et al, 2001;Legendre et al, 2001;Meyer and Candy, 2002;Zavaljevski et al, 2005;Dogandzic and Zhang, 2007;Hasanzadeh et al, 2008;Li et al, 2010;Gao and Meeker, 2012;Ng et al, 2013). Much of the NDE literature has revolved around the issues of noise reduction and comcomitant increased signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and development of methodologies (e.g., development of wavelet methods, expectation-maximization algorithm-type methods) for better estimating the extent and probability of detection (POD) of a flaw in different techniques.…”