EDDY CURRENT IMAGING — A THEORETICAL APPROACH

Eddy current imaging is a relatively new technique of electromagnetic nondestructive testing that makes possible an accurate geometrical characterization of flaws. On contrary to the traditional approach to eddy current testing, spatially correlated information, that can be extracted from two‐dimensional eddy current images, is used to infer about flaw shape and dimensions. In general the problem of flaw reconstruction from the eddy current images belongs to the class of three‐dimensional nonlinear inverse problems. These problems can not be solved without properly chosen simplifications. In recent literature most of the authors tried to take advantage from the problem linearization. They used the eddy current image of a small diameter hole as a point spread function (two‐dimensional impulse response) and applied the classical linear filtering to deblur the image. Although this approach results in the restoration of the top view of the flaw it seems to be inadequate for full flaw reconstruction.