Integrating AI in NDE: Techniques, Trends, and Further Directions

TL;DR

This paper surveys recent AI techniques applied to nondestructive evaluation (NDE), focusing on magnetic, ultrasound, thermography, and optical methods, highlighting trends, challenges, and future directions in NDE 4.0.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of AI applications in NDE, categorizing methods by tasks and drawing interdisciplinary connections to guide future research.

Findings

AI enhances NDE capabilities across multiple modalities

Common mathematical problems unify different NDE tasks

The survey identifies key trends and future directions in NDE 4.0

Abstract

The digital transformation is fundamentally changing our industries, affecting planning, execution as well as monitoring of production processes in a wide range of application fields. With product line-ups becoming more and more versatile and diverse, the necessary inspection and monitoring sparks significant novel requirements on the corresponding Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) systems. The establishment of increasingly powerful approaches to incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) may provide just the needed innovation to solve some of these challenges. In this paper we provide a comprehensive survey about the usage of AI methods in NDE in light of the recent innovations towards NDE 4.0. Since we cannot discuss each NDE modality in one paper, we limit our attention to magnetic methods, ultrasound, thermography, as well as optical inspection. In addition to reviewing recent AI developments in each field, we draw common connections by pointing out NDE-related tasks that have a common underlying mathematical problem and categorizing the state of the art according to the corresponding sub-tasks. In so doing, interdisciplinary connections are drawn that provide a more complete overall picture.