“A tiny crack in a nuclear reactor, skyscraper, bridge or dam can cause catastrophic consequences. The Minneapolis bridge collapse, which killed 13 people in 2007, is just one example of what can happen when structural integrity is compromised.
Unidentified or under-identified structural damage in nuclear reactors can be cataclysmic. Inspection of critical systems such as nuclear reactors is complicated and time-consuming.
Videos captured by an automatic crack detection system can easily misidentify small scratches or welds as cracks, so technicians must review videos frame by frame. It is a time-consuming process with opportunities for human errors.
A system under development at Purdue University uses artificial intelligence to detect cracks captured in videos of nuclear reactors. The system analyzes video, frame by frame, to detect any cracks.
The new system detects cracks in each video frame while the algorithm scheme is capable of tracking the crack from one frame to the next…”