Feasibility of Enhancement Methods in Effective Segmentation of Thermographs for Health Monitoring of Archeological Structures

Archeological structures are prone to aging related deteriorations and environment related corrosion. Rejuvenation of these structures is essential for enhancing the lifetime of these structures to preserve them. Due to the vulnerable nature of these structures, destructive testing techniques cannot be used for acquiring the images for further processing. InfraRed Thermography is the widely accepted Non Destructive Testing (NDT) technique for the acquisition of images. Having acquired the images, the next step is to develop image processing techniques for determining the health conditions of these structures. In this work, feasibility of conventional image enhancement techniques for accurate segmentation of the cold/hot spots from thermographs is studied. Performance metrics are instantaneous error and Mean Absolute Error. Point enhancement operators namely Histogram Equalization and Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization techniques are used for enhancing the acquired thermal images.