Noise suppression and flaw detection of ultrasonic signals via empirical mode decomposition

Abstract

In ultrasonic nondestructive testing, the precise detection of flaw echoes buried in backscattering noise caused by highly scattering materials is a problem of great importance. In this paper, a new signal decomposition method for analyzing nonstationary or nonlinear data, empirical mode decomposition, is proposed to deal with ultrasonic signals. A new denoising technique that combines empirical mode decomposition and filtering simultaneously in the time domain and frequency domain is designed to suppress noise and enhance flaw signals. Synthetic and experimental signals are denoised with this EMD-based filtering technique. Simulated results are presented and analyzed, showing that the proposed technique has an excellent performance even when the signal-to-noise ratio is very low (−23 dB). The improvement in flaw detection was experimentally verified on a pipeline sample with artificial flaws.