A new morphological algorithm for fusing ultrasonic and eddy current images

This paper describes a new algorithm for fusing ultrasonic and eddy current images employing morphological image processing techniques. The fusion is accomplished in two stages. The first stage employs morphological approaches to reduce unwanted artifacts such as speckle noise in the ultrasonic image. In addition to achieving this goal, information about the locations and boundaries of defects contained in the ultrasonic image is also extracted. The second stage aims to fuse the data from the two images by combining information relating to the locations and boundaries of the defect obtained from the ultrasonic data with the defect depth data derived from the eddy current image. The validity of the approach is demonstrated using several ultrasonic and eddy current images.