DEFECT CHARACTERIZATION OF METALLIC MATERIALS USING SELF-PARAMETERIZED DENSITY-BASED CLUSTERING AND COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE TECHNIQUES

Rapid growth of manufacturing industries is propelled by transformative technologies such as machine intelligence, autonomous computing and non-destructive testing (NDT). During the manufacturing of wrought products, there is no guarantee that the final product is 100-% flawless. Thus, all final products are subjected to quality checking to identify and eliminate defective products. In industries, most of internal defects are identified using NDT techniques, which fail to precisely characterize the defects. In this paper a novel algorithm, called Self-Parameterized Density-Based Clustering (SPDBC), is proposed for defect characterization. The proposed clustering method uses spatial parameters to identify the size and position of defects by filtering out the noise and other data that correspond to the non-defect area. Using these filtered data, computational intelligence techniques are employed to predict the defect type. SPDBC achieved Jaccard indices of 97.02 % and 98.78 % for identifying the defect size and position, respectively. Gradient boosting regression trees (GBRT) achieved a maximum accuracy of 97.44 % in predicting the defect type. As a result, the proposed approach can assist NDT experts in various sectors to differentiate between problem severities faster and replace defective parts before any major breakdown occurs.