Comparative Analysis of Human Operators and Advanced Technologies in the Visual Inspection of Aero Engine Blades

Abstract

Background—Aircraft inspection is crucial for safe flight operations and is predominantly performed by human operators, who are unreliable, inconsistent, subjective, and prone to err. Thus, advanced technologies offer the potential to overcome those limitations and improve inspection quality. Method—This paper compares the performance of human operators with image processing, artificial intelligence software and 3D scanning for different types of inspection. The results were statistically analysed in terms of inspection accuracy, consistency and time. Additionally, other factors relevant to operations were assessed using a SWOT and weighted factor analysis. Results—The results show that operators’ performance in screen-based inspection tasks was superior to inspection software due to their strong cognitive abilities, decision-making capabilities, versatility and adaptability to changing conditions. In part-based inspection however, 3D scanning outperformed the operator while being significantly slower. Overall, the strength of technological systems lies in their consistency, availability and unbiasedness. Conclusions—The performance of inspection software should improve to be reliably used in blade inspection. While 3D scanning showed the best results, it is not always technically feasible (e.g., in a borescope inspection) nor economically viable. This work provides a list of evaluation criteria beyond solely inspection performance that could be considered when comparing different inspection systems.

Reflectance Transformation Imaging as a Tool for Computer-Aided Visual Inspection

“…for S 2 HSH remains an equivalent score 2 to DMD which confirm the model's capacity to reproduce a regular reflectance behavior. 2 Investigating participants' spend mean time in Figure 11 were green box-plot indicates 2 mean time spend for consistent votes and red box-plots indicates the mean time spend for 2 non-consistent votes (participant choice is changed between the two replication of the same 2 sequence). we noticed that participant mean time of non-consistent choices is lightly higher 2 then when participants are consistent for 50% of participant which can be explainable of 2 the difficulty of the choice and time spend to hesitate between at least two very similar 2 reconstruction to the original video.…”

“…Indeed, with technological functions being more and more complex and difficult to evaluate objectively, a customer often builds his or her first and global impressions based on a visual assessment. In practice, the inspection tasks are still generally carried out through a visual or visuotactile [1,2] sensory analysis [3][4][5] directly on the objects. The human visual system is able to perform highly complex visual inspection tasks and is very flexible.…”

Ensuring the reliability and reduction of quality control costs by minimizing process variability

“…Another group of articles are those that describe the impact of human factor reliability on the control process and quality of the product. Aust and Pons [4] present a comparative analysis of the effectiveness and efficiency of human evaluation of aircraft parts in relation to the performance of optical systems.…”

Pose Estimation and Damage Characterization of Turbine Blades during Inspection Cycles and Component-Protective Disassembly Processes

“…Using a rigid borescope or a video borescope, a visual inspection is performed, and the component condition is subjectively assessed. This subjective evaluation can be error prone and inconsistent, compared to industrial measurement systems but offers better flexibility in quality assurance [ 2 , 3 , 4 ]. To limit this challenge, many borescopic 2D inspection approaches have been extended with cameras.…”