It is difficult to detect and identify natural defects in welded components. To solve this problem, according to the Faraday magneto-optical (MO) effect, a nondestructive testing system for MO imaging, excited by an alternating magnetic field, is established. For the acquired MO images of crack, pit, lack of penetration, gas pore, and no defect, Gaussian filtering, bilateral filtering, and median filtering are applied for image preprocessing. The effectiveness of these filtering methods is evaluated using metrics such as peak signal–noise ratio (PSNR) and mean squared error. Principal component analysis (PCA) is employed to extract column vector features from the downsampled defect MO images, which then serve as the input layer for the error backpropagation (BP) neural network model and the support vector machine (SVM) model. These two models can be used for the classification of partial defect MO images, but the recognition accuracy for cracks and gas pores is comparatively low. To further enhance the classification accuracy of natural weld defects, a convolutional neural network (CNN) classification model and a ResNet50 classification model for MO images of natural weld defects are established, and the model parameters are evaluated and optimized. The experimental results show that the overall classification accuracy of the ResNet50 model is 99%. Compared with the PCA-SVM model and CNN model, the overall classification accuracy was increased by 7.4% and 1.8%, and the classification accuracy of gas pore increased by 10% and 4%, respectively, indicating that the ResNet50 model can effectively and accurately classify natural weld defects.

In extremely dark conditions, low-light imaging may offer spectators a rich visual experience, which is important for both military and civic applications. However, the images taken in ultra-micro light environments usually have inherent defects such as extremely low brightness and contrast, a high noise level, and serious loss of scene details and colors, which leads to great challenges in the research of low-light image and object detection and classification. The low-light night vision image used as the study object in this work has an excessively dim overall picture and very little information about the screen’s features. Three algorithms, HE, AHE, and CLAHE, were used to enhance and highlight the image. The effectiveness of these image enhancement methods is evaluated using metrics such as the peak signal-to-noise ratio and mean square error, and CLAHE was selected after comparison. The target image includes vehicles, people, license plates, and objects. The gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) was used to extract the texture features of the enhanced images, and the extracted image texture features were used as input to construct a backpropagation (BP) neural network classification model. Then, low-light image classification models were developed based on VGG16 and ResNet50 convolutional neural networks combined with low-light image enhancement algorithms. The experimental results show that the overall classification accuracy of the VGG16 convolutional neural network model is 92.1%. Compared with the BP and ResNet50 neural network models, the classification accuracy was increased by 4.5% and 2.3%, respectively, demonstrating its effectiveness in classifying low-light night vision targets.

This study investigates the magneto-optical imaging (MOI) characteristics of weld defects under alternating magnetic field excitation. A magneto-optical sensor is employed to detect different types of weld defects, and the correlation between MOI features and magnetic field intensity is analyzed based on the Faraday magneto-optical effect. A finite element analysis (FEA) model integrated with a magnetic dipole model is established to explore the relationship between lift-off values and leakage magnetic field intensity, while clarifying the connection between magnetic flux leakage (MFL) signals and defect size as well as type. The results demonstrate that defects of varying sizes and types generate distinct MFL intensities. Meanwhile, in the MOI-based nondestructive testing (NDT) experiments, the gray values of MO images corresponding to defects of different sizes and types exhibit significant differences, indicating that the gray values of MO images can reflect the magnitude of leakage magnetic field defects. This research lays a theoretical foundation for industrial MOI nondestructive testing and provides clear engineering guidance for defect detection.