COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE METHODOLOGIES FOR NON DESTRUCTIVE TESTING/EVALUATION APPLICATIONS

This chapter aims to show how some relevant industrial applications of Non Destructive Testing and Evaluation (NDT/NDE) can benefit of some recently emerged Computational Intelligence (CI) techniques. The problems under study are generally formulated as inverse problems whose typical ill-posedness and ill-conditioning (in their numerical counterpart) can be dealt with such tools like innovative signal processing techniques (i.e., Independent Component Analysis, ICA, wavelet representation, Support Vector Machines, Fuzzy Systems, Neural Networks). Some practical examples for the solution of relevant inspection problems will be discussed. The advantages of using the CI approach will be clarified and assessed on applications of NDT/NDE in both civil engineering and industrial problems.