Advanced Diagnostics of Aircraft Structures Using Automated Non-Invasive Imaging Techniques: A Comprehensive Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aviation industry currently faces several challenges in inspecting and diagnosing aircraft structures. Current aircraft inspection methods still need to be fully automated, making early detection and precise sizing of defects difficult. Researchers have expressed concerns about current aircraft inspections, citing safety, maintenance costs, and reliability issues. The next generation of aircraft inspection leverages semi-autonomous and fully autonomous systems integrating robotic technologies with advanced Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) methods. Active Thermography (AT) is an example of an NDT method widely used for non-invasive aircraft inspection to detect surface and near-surface defects, such as delamination, debonding, corrosion, impact damage, and cracks. It is suitable for both metallic and non-metallic materials and does not require a coupling agent or direct contact with the test piece, minimising contamination. Visual inspection using an RGB camera is another well-known non-contact NDT method capable of detecting surface defects. A newer option for NDT in aircraft maintenance is 3D scanning, which uses laser or LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technologies. This method offers several advantages, including non-contact operation, high accuracy, and rapid data collection. It is effective across various materials and shapes, enabling the creation of detailed 3D models. An alternative approach to laser and LiDAR technologies is photogrammetry. Photogrammetry is cost-effective in comparison with laser and LiDAR technologies. It can acquire high-resolution texture and colour information, which is especially important in the field of maintenance inspection. In this proposed approach, an automated vision-based damage evaluation system will be developed capable of detecting and characterising defects in metallic and composite aircraft specimens by analysing 3D data acquired using an RGB camera and a IRT camera through photogrammetry. Such a combined approach is expected to improve defect detection accuracy, reduce aircraft downtime and operational costs, improve reliability and safety and minimise human error.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".