NDT&E International 37 (2004) 291–299

www.elsevier.com/locate/ndteint

Assessment of welding defects for gas pipeline radiographs

using computer vision
H.I. Shafeeka, E.S. Gadelmawlab,*, A.A. Abdel-Shafyb, I.M. Elewab
a
Mechanical Engineering Department, Higher Technological Institute, Tenth of Ramadan City, Egypt
b
Production Engineering and Mechanical Design Department, Faculty of Engineering, Mansoura University, Mansoura 35516, Egypt
Received 21 July 2003; revised 14 October 2003; accepted 15 October 2003

Abstract
In this paper, a novel automated vision system is introduced to detect and assess the welding defects of gas pipelines from the radiographic
films. The proposed vision system was used to capture images for the radiographic films and apply various image processing and computer
vision algorithms to detect the welding defects and to calculate necessary information such as length, width, area and perimeter of the defects.
A developed software, named AutoWDA, has been fully written in lab using Microsoft Visual Cþþ 6 to perform the analysis process. The
proposed system offers many advantages such as enhancing the captured images so that the defects appear much clear and eliminating the
loss of image details, which occurs due to film deterioration by the time, by transferring the radiographic films into digitized images, which
could be saved on magnetic mass storage media. The proposed system is considered quite cheap compared with commercial radiographic
image enhancement systems.
q 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Computer vision; Welding defects; Feature extraction; Radiography

1. Introduction recently applied in many fields such as automatic inspection

Pipelines are considered the safest and the most
economical way for transporting gas or liquids over long
distances. Therefore, welding inspection on oil and gas
pipelines has always been one of the most important areas of
Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) [1]. The radiography film
method has been the cornerstone of the NDT for the last 50
years [2]. Many inspection tasks are considered time-
consuming and/or boring for humans to perform. It has been
reported that human visual inspection estimated to account
for 10% or more of the total labor costs for manufactured
products. In addition, human visual inspection is, at best,
80% effective and furthermore, this effectiveness can only
be achieved if a rigidly structured set of inspection checks is
implemented [3]. Due to the recent developments in digital
image processing and computer vision, automated visual
inspection is being extensively applied because human
inspectors are not always consistent evaluators of products
and it allows objects to be inspected in unsafe environments
for people [3]. On the other hand, machine vision has been
* Corresponding author. Tel.: þ 20-122-808-003; fax: þ20-402-977-854.
E-mail address: esamy@mans.edu.eg (E.S. Gadelmawla).
0963-8695/$ - see front matter q 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.ndteint.2003.10.003
[4,5], defect analysis [6,7], detection of welding defects [8],
part measurements [9,10], assessment of surface texture
[11], and analysis of radiography [12 – 14]. In quality control
applications, the measurement process of some features,
such as the product’s length or weight is termed as
quantitative inspection [15]. This work introduces a novel
vision system for the detection and assessment of welding
defects of gas pipelines radiography. The tested radio-
graphic films were produced for gas pipelines welded by the
Shielded Metal Arc Welding (SMAW) method.
2. Problem description
The great number of radiographic images, which have to
be taken over very long distances of welded gas pipelines,
makes the detection of welding defects difficult and time-
consuming. The most difficult problem in the inspection
cycle is the accurate detection of flaws in a given radio-
graphic image. The human interpretation of radiographic
films is a hard and difficult task when a great number of
defects are to be counted and evaluated. It is known that
several experts do not have the same opinion for a given film,
292 H.I. Shafeek et al. / NDT&E International 37 (2004) 291–299
and even the same expert might have a different report at the
beginning or at the end of the workday fro the same film. This
work introduces a novel automated vision system for the
detection and assessment of gas pipelines welding defects
from the radiographic films.
3. Producing the radiographic films
Radiographic films of welded pipelines are produced by
the Radiographic Testing (RT) method. This method is
based on recording the varying degree of absorption of the
penetrating radiation by objection the conventional film
radiography. This varying degree of absorption produces a
latent image of the object being examined on a film. The
film is chemically processed to transform the latent image
into a permanent shadow image of the internal and external
conditions of the object. The processed film is called the
radiograph. If the object tested by the RT contains a flaw,
more radiation will pass through the flaw area of the weld
than the surrounding areas creating a shadow image on the
film. The produced radiographs could be interpreted and the
integrity of object could be evaluated by either expert
inspectors or automatic inspection systems. While produ-
cing the radiographic films, the image quality indicators
(IQIs) are mounted on the radiographic films to gain some
quantitative information about the sensitivity of produced
films. The IQIs are test wires of strictly controlled
dimensions, which manufactured of the same material as
the specimen being radiographed. Measured wire IQI
sensitivity is usually quoted as the minimum visible wire
diameter expressed as a percentage of weld metal thickness.
The radiographic films used in this work were obtained
from the Petroleum Projects and Technical Consultations
Fig. 1. Photograph of the proposed vision system.
Company (PETROJET) in Egypt. The radiographic films
were produced by the company according to the API 1104
using the Iridium 192 (Ir-192) to meet quality class DB.
4. The proposed vision system
The proposed vision system consists of two parts,
hardware and software. The hardware includes an IBM
compatible personal computer with Windows operating
system, frame grabber with resolution up to 760 £
570 pixels and a Charged Couple Device (CCD) camera.
The software is especially written to detect and assess
welding defects of the gas pipelines radiographic films. The
proposed software, Automatic Welding Defects Assessment
(AutoWDA), was developed totally in-house using Micro-
soft Visual Cþ þ and is ready to run under Windows
operating systems. It was developed such that it can be used
independently without referring to any other software. In
addition, it supports many different image file formats such
as BMP, TIFF, GIF, JPG, PCX and TGA.
The system is adjusted to capture a maximum area of
9 cm in length and 7 cm in height of the radiographic films,
which enable a pixel size of about 123 mm. The size of the
captured images controlled by using different lenses and
varying the distance between the camera and the films. The
area of the captured images could be increases by using a
high-resolution frame grabber.
5. Working procedures
Fig. 1 shows a photograph of the proposed system. As
shown in the figure, the procedures of working could be
 H.I. Shafeek et al. / NDT&E International 37 (2004) 291–299 293

summarized as follows:

1. The radiographic film (1) is placed on a backlighting

table (2) then an image is acquired by the CCD camera
(3) and saved to a BMP file using the capturing software
provided with the frame grabber.
2. The BMP file is opened by the AutoWDA software then
converted to gray scale image.
3. Specific window is created around the defect or the
whole welding area then the various algorithms are
sequentially applied to the specified window to obtain the
defects information.

6. Capturing image considerations

Many parameters affect the quality of the radiographic

captured images such as lens focal length, lighting
conditions and the focus. To obtain high-quality captured
images, the radiographic films should be captured under
optimum conditions. The IQIs produced on the radiographic
films is considered to be a good target to assess the quality of
the acquired images. Therefore, the capturing conditions
should be adjusted so that any IQI feature on radiographic
films should be seen clearly in the captured images.

7. Image processing algorithms

The AutoWDA software applies many image processing

algorithms on the radiographic captured images to detect the
welding defects and to extract some useful information.
Fig. 2 shows a block diagram of the main algorithms used by
the AutoWDA software. These algorithms have been
applied sequentially as shown in the figure.

7.1. Image preprocessing

Image preprocessing seeks to modify and prepare the

pixel values of a digitized image to produce more suitable
form for subsequent operations. Many algorithms were used
such as converting color images to gray scale images,
extracting the gray level histogram and calculating a
suitable Threshold. In addition, image enhancement algor-
ithms such as histogram stretch and histogram equalization
are applied to get the optimum image before the segmenta-
tion process.

7.2. Image enhancement

Details of the defects in captured images could be
enhanced by applying both histogram stretch and
histogram equalization to the original image. The main
objective of the histogram stretch algorithm is to increase
the contrast of a low contrast images. The goal of
histogram equalization is to create an image with equally
Fig. 2. Block diagram of the main algorithms of the AutoWDA software.
distributed brightness levels over the whole brightness
scale. As a result, the image appears significantly brighter
and the general shape of the welding seems enhanced
so that more details are visible to eye. In addition,
294 H.I. Shafeek et al. / NDT&E International 37 (2004) 291–299
the median filter is used to remove unwanted noise from
the captured images.
7.3. Histogram specification
Although the histogram equalization algorithm is quite
useful, it does not lend itself to interactive image
enhancement applications. This is because its capabilities
are limited to the generation of only one result, an
approximation to a uniform histogram. The histogram
specification provides the ability to specify particular
histograms capable of highlighting certain gray-level ranges
in an image. This procedure yields a processed version of
original image, where the new gray levels are characterized
by specified density histogram (desired histogram). The
principal difficulty in applying the histogram specification
method to image enhancement lies in being able to construct
a meaningful histogram. To make the creation of the density
histograms flexible, a user-friendly dialog has been
designed to create and modify the density histograms.
Fig. 3. (a) A captured image for a radiographic film (b) Applying the Histogram Specification to the captured image.
Fig. 3a shows a captured image for a radiographic film and
Fig. 3b shows the effect of applying the histogram
specification to the weld area of the image. Many suitable
density histograms were created and tested to suit most of
the captured images. The density histograms play an
important point in the segmentation process. Therefore, it
could be applied to the captured image by three ways: (1) by
using the default density histogram, (2) by selecting a menu
command to cycle through the predefined density histo-
grams and choose the best one, (3) by creating a separate
density histogram manually.
8. Segmentation and defects extraction
The segmentation process deals with the separation of
the defects from the surrounding areas using a suitable
Threshold, hence converting the image in the specified
window to binary image. After the segmentation process has
been completed, the 8 neighborhoods boundary chain code
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Fig. 4. Boundary chain codes. (a) Directions of the eight neighbourhood pixels relative to the previous pixel (b) Chain codes of a sample boundary.

Fig. 5. Procedures of defect detection for an image contains two clear defects.
296 H.I. Shafeek et al. / NDT&E International 37 (2004) 291–299

(BCC) algorithm is applied to identify the contours of the moments calculated by this equation will vary depend-
defects. As a result, the coordinates of the boundary edges of ing on the position of the object because calculations are
all defects are extracted and stored in an array with specified done on the basis of the absolute position of the object. The
code for each boundary. In addition, the chain code marks moments could be calculated independently from the
each boundary pixel by a code number represents its position of the object using the central moments ðmpq Þ;
direction relative to the previous boundary pixel as shown in which could be calculated by the following equation:
Fig. 4a. A sample boundary and the corresponding code for ð1 ð1
each pixel is shown in Fig. 4b. The boundary edge codes are mpq ¼ ðx 2 x Þp ðy 2 y Þq f ðx; yÞdx dy ð3Þ
21 21
used to calculate area, perimeter, width and height of the
defects by creating short lines between each two successive Where x and y are the coordinates of the center of gravity
boundary pixels. All calculations are based on the area of of the object. For digitized images, Eqs. (1) and (2) could be
each pixel, which is assumed to be unity (1 £ 1). When the used as follows:
system is calibrated, the actual width and height of the pixel
is calculated, hence all calculations could be obtained in XX
mpq ¼ ðxp yq Þ ð4Þ
absolute units (mm or inch). x y

8.1. Calculating perimeter of the defects

XX
mpq ¼ ðx 2 x Þp ðy 2 y Þq ð5Þ
For any closed boundary, the perimeter ðPÞ of any defect x y
could be calculated as follows:
The value of x and y could be calculated by the following
X
N
equations:
P¼ ni ð1Þ
i¼1 m m
x ¼ 10 and y ¼ 01 ð6Þ
m00 m00
Where N ¼ Number of boundarypffiffipixels, ni ¼ 1 for pixels
having codes 0, 2, 4, 6, and ni ¼ 2 for pixels having codes Where:
1, 3, 5, 7.
m00 ¼ Summation of all x and y coordinates of pixels
8.2. Calculating the area of defects within the object (area of the object).
m10 ¼ Summation of all x-coordinates of pixels within
The area of defects was calculated using the theory of the object.
moments [16], which defines the moments ðmpq Þ of an image m01 ¼ Summation of all y-coordinates of pixels within
f ðx; yÞ by the following equation: the object.
ð1 ð1
mpq ¼ xp yq f ðx; yÞdx dy ð2Þ 8.3. Calculating width and height of the defects
21 21

Where: x; y represent pixel coordinates and p; q represent The width ðwÞ and the height ðhÞ of defects could be
the moment orders. For a given object within an image, calculated from the chain code array using the following

Fig. 6. Information of the two defects shown in Fig. 4h.

 H.I. Shafeek et al. / NDT&E International 37 (2004) 291–299 297

equations: 9. Calibration of the vision system

X
N X
N
Two calibration techniques have been provided with
w¼ wi and h ¼ hi ð7Þ
i¼1 i¼1
the AutoWDA software, fixed and variable calibrations.
The two techniques provide the ability to calculate the
Where wi ¼ 1 for pixels having codes 0, 1, 7 and wi ¼ 0 for extracted features in either image units (pixels) or absolute
pixels having the other codes, hi ¼ 1 for pixels having codes units (mm). The fixed calibration is based on two
1, 2, 3 and hi ¼ 0 for pixels having the other codes. parameters, the focal length of the lens used to capture

Fig. 7. Procedures of defect detection for an image contains unclear defect.

298 H.I. Shafeek et al. / NDT&E International 37 (2004) 291–299
the image and the distance between the CCD camera and the
backlighting table. This technique is suitable when radio-
graphic films are tested under the same conditions, such as
using the same lens, lighting and the same distance between
the camera and the backlighting table. The fixed calibration
technique was mentioned in a previous work related to
DMVision software [9].
The variable calibration technique is based on setting an
object with known dimensions; typically slip gauges, on the
dead area of the radiographic film while capturing the
image. In this type, the calibration process is performed
separately for each image by drawing a line at the two end
points of the slip gauge and entering the corresponding
length. This process should be performed in both X and Y
directions to calculate the calibration factor in both X and Y
directions. This technique is suitable when radiographic
films are tested under variable conditions such as changing
the lens or the distance between the camera and the
backlighting table frequently.
10. Experimental study
A typical radiographic film from AGFA ‘Radiographer’s
Weld Interpretation Reference’, which is used for training,
is captured as shown in Fig. 5a. The procedures of detecting
the defects of this image are shown in the same figure.
Fig. 5b shows a specified window around the whole welding
area. After applying the histogram stretch algorithm
(Fig. 5c), the welding area enhanced and the two defects
appear much dark. More enhancements were obtained by
applying the histogram equalization algorithm as shown in
Fig. 5d. In Fig. 5e the median filter was applied and as a
result the image appears much smoother, compared with the
image in Fig. 5d. In Fig. 5f, the histogram specification
algorithm was applied and the defects become much visible.
Fig. 5g shows the binary image of the welding area after
applying the calculated Threshold. The BCC algorithm was
applied to the binary image and the two defects
were extracted as shown in Fig. 5h.
Fig. 8. Results of the defect shown in Fig. 6.
Fig. 6a and b show the defect information obtained for
the left and the right defects, respectively. The defect
information could be obtained by clicking the Show Data
button (Fig. 5h) then double clicking on the defect. The
Zoom button in Fig. 5h could be used to magnify the defects
up to 500% from the original size.
Fig. 7a shows another captured image for unclear defect
and a specific window around it. Fig. 7 shows the same
procedures applied in Fig. 5 to detect the defect. In Fig. 8a,
the calculated Threshold for the defect is 64, which did not
separate the defect from the weld area; therefore, the
Threshold was increased to 71 manually by moving the
slider at the bottom to separate the defect from the weld
area. Changing the value of the Threshold may slightly
change the shape of the detected defect. This is due to the
change in the gray levels at the boundary of the defects.
Fig. 8b shows the defect after magnified by 300% and Fig. 8c
shows the defect information.
11. Discussion
The specified window could be taken either as small
window around the defects or as a total window around the
welding area. For unclear defects (Fig. 7), the gray levels of
the defects are close to the gray levels of the surrounding
area, so the specified window should be as small as possible
around the defect. For clear defects (Fig. 5), the specified
window could be taken around the whole welding area.
Although the two defects were detected, the right defect
seems to be less than the original one because the boundary
pixels of that defect have light gray scale. In this case it is
recommended to take small specific window around each
defect individually. Although a suitable density histogram
has been created and tested with many radiographic images,
some images need little change in the density (desired)
histogram to give good results. This could be overcome by
designing an interactive dialog box to modify the density
histogram so that the changes reflected directly on the
image. In addition, more than one density histogram could
 H.I. Shafeek et al. / NDT&E International 37 (2004) 291–299
be created and saved for each specific type of defects. The
preprocessing and the image enhancement algorithms
affect, significantly, the results of the detected defects.
Most defects could be detected by applying the mentioned
algorithms sequentially. Although changing the value of the
Threshold may slightly change the shape of the detected
defect, the general shape of the defect does not change.
12. Conclusions
Radiography is the most common method for NDT and is
used widely for testing pipelines welding. This study
introduces a developed vision-based system for the
automatic assessment of radiography welding defects.
Many algorithms were used to enhance the image and to
detect the defected areas. Useful information about the
defects could be obtained such as area, perimeter, length and
width of the defects. This information could be used in the
future to classify the welding defects according to
international standards, such as the American Petroleum
Institute (API) standard, and to take acceptance decisions
about the defects. The proposed system is quite cheap
compared with the commercial automatic inspection
systems and it eliminates the need for image interoperation
by a skilled inspectors. Many enhancements could be
applied to the captured images so that the welding defects
displayed much visible for human eyes. In addition, the
proposed system eliminates any loss of image details due to
the film deterioration by storing the radiographic films on
magnetic media for mass storage.
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