Automated Registration of Multi-Mode Nondestructive Evaluation Data

Registration techniques play a central role in applications of image processing to computer vision, medical imaging, and automatic target tracking. Feature-based techniques such as scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) and speeded up robust features (SURF) are commonly used to register images derived from a single modality. However, SIFT and SURF struggle to register images from different modalities because the features tend to manifest rather differently and at sometimes very different length-scales. The most successful methods that have been developed to register multi-modal data use information-theoretic approaches. These methods play a key part in nondestructive evaluation scenarios where data that is collected by sensors of different modalities must be registered to be fused. In this paper, automated registration based on normalized mutual information is applied to align data derived from ultrasonic and radiographic inspections of (i) additively manufactured titanium alloy test coupons, and (ii) thin, lithium metal pouch-cell batteries. The quality of the registration is quantified in terms of computational resources and spatial accuracy. In the first case the X-ray computed tomography (XCT) data is captured on a region corresponding to a small subset of the ultrasonic data, while in the case of the lithium batteries the digital radiography (DR) captures a larger region of interest than the ultrasonic data. In both cases the radiographic data resolution is much higher than for ultrasound, but interestingly, in both cases the accuracy of the registration is approximately equal to two-to-three-pixel lengths in the ultrasonic images.