Enhancement of the Ultrasonic Image Using the Adaptive Window Log Filter for NDI of Aircraft Composite Materials

In this paper, we propose an enhancement of the ultrasonic image for non-destructive inspection of aircraft composite materials. The ultrasonic images are corrupted by a speckle noise which has the characteristic of granular pattern noise and is in all types of coherent imaging systems, the signal independent and multiplicative noise. In this paper, we derive a filter, called the AWLF(Adaptive Window Log Filter), from the nature of the speckle. The filter is made of the MEAN Filter in the edge region and Log Filter in the flat or noise region. To make a distinction between edge and flat region, we calculate the inclination around the local window instead of computing the local statistics of pixels such as local mean and standard deviation . According to the obtained region, edge region is performed by the mean filter and flat region by the Log filter. Performance of the proposed filter is evaluated by the Enhanced Factor and the Speckle Index(SI).