Francis Howard Little

Multimodal Industrial Inspection and Analysis

Diagnosis of complex engineering systems requires the use of multiple sensor sources to acquire information. In this paper we present a survey of multimodal data acquisition systems for nondestructive testing (NDT) and engineering analysis. We begin with a summary of the relative strengths and weaknesses of individual NDT modalities. Thereafter we present existing multimodal inspection hardware systems that use complementary NDT sensors. The advantages of such multimodal data acquisition over conventional single modality sensors in inspection and analysis are highlighted. Possible approaches to fuse complementary multimodal sensor data are discussed. We conclude with possible directions for the future development of multimodal inspection systems.