• Journal of Periodontal and Implant Science
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• v.47 no.1
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• pp.41-50
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• 2017

Purpose: The aims of the present study were to compare the image quality and visibility of tooth cracks between conventional methods and swept-source optical coherence tomography (SS-OCT) and to develop an automatic detection technique for tooth cracks by SS-OCT imaging. Methods: We evaluated SS-OCT with a near-infrared wavelength centered at 1,310 nm over a spectral bandwidth of 100 nm at a rate of 50 kHz as a new diagnostic tool for the detection of tooth cracks. The reliability of the SS-OCT images was verified by comparing the crack lines with those detected using conventional methods. After performing preprocessing of the obtained SS-OCT images to emphasize cracks, an algorithm was developed and verified to detect tooth cracks automatically. Results: The detection capability of SS-OCT was superior or comparable to that of trans-illumination, which did not discriminate among the cracks according to depth. Other conventional methods for the detection of tooth cracks did not sense initial cracks with a width of less than $100{\mu}m$. However, SS-OCT detected cracks of all sizes, ranging from craze lines to split teeth, and the crack lines were automatically detected in images using the Hough transform. Conclusions: We were able to distinguish structural cracks, craze lines, and split lines in tooth cracks using SS-OCT images, and to automatically detect the position of various cracks in the OCT images. Therefore, the detection capability of SS-OCT images provides a useful diagnostic tool for cracked tooth syndrome.

• Korean Journal of Materials Research
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.149-153
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• 2013

Delamination crack detection is very important for improving the structural reliability of laminated composite structures. This requires real-time delamination detection technologies. For composite laminates that are reinforced with carbon fiber, an electrical potential method uses carbon fiber for reinforcements and sensors at the same time. The use of carbon fiber for sensors does not need to consider the strength reduction of smart structures induced by imbedding sensors into the structures. With carbon fiber reinforced (CF/) epoxy matrix composites, it had been proved that the delamination crack was detected experimentally. In the present study, therefore, similar experiments were conducted to prove the applicability of the method for delamination crack detection of CF/polyetherethereketone matrix composite laminates. Mode I and mode II delamination tests with artificial cracks were conducted, and three point bending tests without artificial cracks were conducted. This study experimentally proves the applicability of the method for detection of delamination cracks. CF/polyetherethereketone material has strong electric resistance anisotropy. For CF/polyetherethereketone matrix composites, a carbon fiber network is constructed, and the network is broken by propagation of delamination cracks. This causes a change in the electric resistance of CF/polyetherethereketone matrix composites. Using three point bending specimens, delamination cracks generated without artificial initial cracks is proved to be detectable using the electric potential method: This method successfully detected delamination cracks.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.779-789
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• 2021

Cracks in railway sleeper are an inevitable condition and has a significant influence on the safety of railway system. Although the technology of railway sleeper condition monitoring using machine learning (ML) models has been widely applied, the crack recognition accuracy is still in need of improvement. In this paper, a two-stage method using edge detection and convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed to reduce the burden of computing for detecting cracks in railway sleepers with high accuracy. In the first stage, the edge detection is carried out by using the 3×3 neighborhood range algorithm to find out the possible crack areas, and a series of mathematical morphology operations are further used to eliminate the influence of noise targets to the edge detection results. In the second stage, a CNN model is employed to classify the results of edge detection. Through the analysis of abundant images of sleepers with cracks, it is proved that the cracks detected by the neighborhood range algorithm are superior to those detected by Sobel and Canny algorithms, which can be classified by proposed CNN model with high accuracy.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.203-209
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• 2023

One major advantage of ground penetrating radar (GPR) over other field test methods is its ability to obtain subsurface images of roads in an efficient and non-intrusive manner. Not only can the strata of pavement structure be retrieved from the GPR scan images, but also various irregularities, such as cracks and internal cavities. This article introduces a deep learning-based approach, focusing on detecting subsurface cracks by recognizing their distinctive hyperbolic signatures in the GPR scan images. Given the limited road sections that contain target features, two data augmentation methods, i.e., feature insertion and generation, are implemented, resulting in 9,174 GPR scan images. One of the most popular real-time object detection models, You Only Learn One Representation (YOLOR), is trained for detecting the target features for two types of subsurface cracks: bottom cracks and full cracks from the GPR scan images. The former represents partial cracks initiated from the bottom of the asphalt layer or base layers, while the latter includes extended cracks that penetrate these layers. Our experiments show the test average precisions of 0.769, 0.803 and 0.735 for all cracks, bottom cracks, and full cracks, respectively. This demonstrates the practicality of deep learning-based methods in detecting subsurface cracks from GPR scan images.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.221-235
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• 2022

Among nondestructive damage detection methods, impedance-based methods have been recognized as an effective technique for damage identification in many kinds of structures. This paper proposes a method to detect cracks in metal structures by combining electro-mechanical impedance (EMI) responses and artificial neural networks (ANN). Firstly, the theories of EMI responses and impedance-based damage detection methods are described. Secondly, the reliability of numerical simulations for impedance responses is demonstrated by comparing to pre-published results for an aluminum beam. Thirdly, the proposed method is used to detect cracks in the beam. The RMSD (root mean square deviation) index is used to alarm the occurrence of the cracks, and the multi-layer perceptron (MLP) ANN is employed to identify the location and size of the cracks. The selection of the effective frequency range is also investigated. The analysis results reveal that the proposed method accurately detects the cracks' occurrence, location, and size in metal structures.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.1035-1041
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• 2016

Internal cracks in products are invisible and can lead to fatal crashes or damage. Since X-rays can penetrate materials and be attenuated according to the material’s thickness and density, they have rapidly become the accepted technology for non-destructive inspection of internal cracks. This paper presents a robust crack filter based on local gray level variation and multiscale analysis for automatic detection of cracks in X-ray images. The proposed filter takes advantage of the image gray level and its local variations to detect cracks in the X-ray image. To overcome the problems of image noise and the non-uniform intensity of the X-ray image, a new method of estimating the local gray level variation is proposed in this paper. In order to detect various sizes of crack, this paper proposes using different neighboring distances to construct an image pyramid for multiscale analysis. By use of local gray level variation and multiscale analysis, the proposed crack filter is able to detect cracks of various sizes in X-ray images while contending with the problems of noise and non-uniform intensity. Experimental results show that the proposed crack filter outperforms the Gaussian model based crack filter and the LBP model based method in terms of detection accuracy, false detection ratio and processing speed.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.61-67
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• 2014

Micro-cracks in crystalline silicon wafer often result in wafer breakage in solar wafer manufacturing, and also their existence may lead to electrical failure in post fabrication inspection. Therefore, the reliable detection of micro-cracks is of importance in the photovoltaic industry. In this paper, an experimental method to select optimal parameters in anisotropic diffusion filter is proposed. It can reliably detect micro-cracks by the distinct extension of boundary as well as noise reduction in near-infrared image patterns of micro-cracks. Its performance is verified by experiments of several type cracks machined.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.14 no.6
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• pp.1353-1358
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• 2010

In this paper, we propose a detection method that automatically detects concrete surface cracks using fuzzy method in the image of concrete surface cracks. First, the proposed method detecting concrete surface cracks detects the candidate crack areas by applying R, G, B channel values of the concrete crack image to fuzzy method. We finally detect cracks by the density information about the detected candidate areas after we remove the detailed noises on the image of the concrete surface cracks. The experiments using real concrete images showed that the proposed method is greatly improved of crack detection compared with the conventional methods.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 1998.04a
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• pp.309-316
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• 1998

In this paper, a newly derived formulation of a crack detection model is presented and its feasibility to detect cracks in structures is verified experimentally. To meet this objective, the followig approach is utilized. Firstly, the crack detection scheme which consists of the damage localization model and the crack detection model is formulated. Secondly, the feasibility and practicality of the complete procedure of the crack detection model is evaluated by locating and sizing cracks in clamped-clamped beams for which a f3w modal parameters were measured for sixteen uncracked and cracked states. Major results observed from the crack detection exercises include that far most damage cases, the predicted crack locations falls within very close to the inflicted locations of cracks in the test beam and the size of crack values estimated at the predicted locations are very close to the inflicted magnitudes.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.46 no.6
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• pp.869-874
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• 2014

It was discovered in a Korean PWR that an extensive number of very short and shallow cracks in the SG tubes were undetectable by eddy current in-service-inspection because of the masking effect of sludge deposits. Axial stress corrosion cracks at the outside diameter of the steam generator tubes near the line contacts with the tube support plates are the major concern among the six identical Korean nuclear power plants having CE-type steam generators with Alloy 600 high temperature mill annealed tubes, HU3&4 and HB3~6. The tubes in HB3&4 have a less susceptible microstructure so that the onset of ODSCC was substantially delayed compared to HU3&4 whose tubes are most susceptible to ODSCC among the six units. The numbers of cracks detected by the eddy current inspection jumped drastically after the steam generators of HB4 were chemically cleaned. The purpose of the chemical cleaning was to mitigate stress corrosion cracking by removing the heavy sludge deposit, since a corrosive environment is formed in the occluded region under the sludge deposit. SGCC also enhances the detection capability of the eddy current inspection at the same time. Measurement of the size of each crack using the motorized rotating pancake coil probe indicated that the cracks in HB4 were shorter and substantially shallower than the cracks in HU3&4. It is believed that the cracks were shorter and shallower because the microstructure of the tubes in HB4 is less susceptible to ODSCC. It was readily understood from the size distribution of the cracks and the quantitative information available on the probability of detection that most cracks in HB4 had been undetected until the steam generators were chemically cleaned.