Image Enhancement and Corrosion Detection for UAV Visual Inspection of Pressure Vessels

Abstract

The condition of a pressure vessel is normally checked by human operators, which have health and safety risks as well as low working efficiency and high inspection cost. Visual inspection for pressure vessels can be done by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with the sensing module. Image enhancement techniques and image processing techniques are vital in the UAV inspection of pressure vessels. However, there are several issues to be overcome in the UAV visual inspection of pressure vessels. The images captured by the UAV are of low quality under the cluttered environment due to poor lighting, noises and vibrations caused by the UAV. In this research, a system is developed for UAV visual inspection of pressure vessels using image processing and image enhancement techniques. In the developed system, the input image is captured by the UAV first. Next, efficient image enhancement techniques are applied to the images in order to enhance image qualities. After that, the corrosion part is detected and the percentage of the corrosion area in the entire image is measured.The proposed system has the potential to be implemented for the autonomous correction detection with the image enhancement techniques in UAV visual inspection for the pressure vessels.