Reconstruction of laser ultrasonic wavefield images from reduced sparse measurements using compressed sensing aided super-resolution

Abstract

Laser ultrasonic scanning is attractive for damage detection due to its noncontact nature, sensitivity to local damage, and high spatial resolution. However, its practicality is limited because scanning at a high spatial resolution demands a prohibitively long scanning time. Recently, compressed sensing (CS) and super-resolution (SR) are gaining popularity in the image recovery field. CS estimates unmeasured ultrasonic responses from measured responses, and SR recovers high spatial frequency information from low resolution images. Inspired by these techniques, a laser ultrasonic wavefield reconstruction technique is developed to localize and visualize damage with a reduced number of ultrasonic measurements. First, a low spatial resolution ultrasonic wavefield image for a given inspection region is reconstructed from reduced number of ultrasonic measurements using CS. Here, the ultrasonic waves are generated using a pulsed laser, and measured at a fixed sensing point using a laser Doppler vibrometer (LDV). Then, a high spatial resolution ultrasonic wave image is recovered from the reconstructed low spatial resolution image using SR. The number of measurement points required for ultrasonic wavefield imaging is significantly reduced over 90%. The performance of the proposed technique is validated by an experiment performed on a cracked aluminum plate.