Detection of cracks in nuclear power plant using spatial-temporal grouping of local patches

Robust inspection is important to ensure the safety of nuclear power plant components. An automated approach would require detecting often low contrast cracks that could be surrounded by or even within textures with similar appearances such as welding, scratches and grind marks. We propose a crack detection method for nuclear power plant inspection videos by fine tuning a deep neural network for detecting local patches containing cracks which are then grouped in spatial-temporal space for group-level classification. We evaluate the proposed method on a data set consisting of 17 videos consisting of nearly 150,000 frames of inspection video and provide comparison to prior methods.