Analysis of industrial X-ray computed tomography data with deep neural networks

Paper in proceeding, 2021

X-ray computed tomography (XCT) is increasingly utilized industrially at material- and process development as well as in non-destructive quality control; XCT is important to many emerging manufacturing technologies, for example metal additive manufacturing. These trends lead to increased needs of safe automatic or semi-automatic data interpretation, considered an open research question for many critical high value industrial products such as within the aerospace industry. By safe, we mean that the interpretation is not allowed to unawarely or unexpectedly fail; specifically the algorithms must react sensibly to inputs dissimilar to the training data, so called out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. In this work we explore data interpretation with deep neural networks to address: robust safe data interpretation which includes a confidence estimate with respect to OOD data, an OOD detector; generation of realistic synthetic material aw indications for the material science and nondestructive evaluation community. We have focused on industrial XCT related challenges, addressing difficulties with spatially correlated X-ray quantum noise. Results are reported on training auto-encoders (AE) and generative adversarial networks (GAN), on a publicly available XCT dataset of additively manufactured metal. We demonstrate that adding modeled X-ray noise during training reduces artefacts in the generated imperfection indications as well as improves the OOD detector performance. In addition, we show that the OOD detector can detect real and synthetic OOD data and still model the accepted in-distribution data down to the X-ray noise levels.