A new probe concept for internal pipework inspection

Summan, Rahul and Mathur, Neha and Dobie, Gordon and West, Graeme and Marshall, Stephen and MacLeod, Charles and Mineo, Carmelo and Pierce, Gareth; (2017) A new probe concept for internal pipework inspection. In: Nuclear Plant Instrumentation, Control, and Human-Machine Interface Technologies (NPIC&HMIT 2017). American Nuclear Society, USA. ISBN 9780894487439

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Abstract

The interior visual inspection of nuclear pipework is a critical inspection activity required to ensure the continued safe, reliable operation of plant and thus avoid costly outages. Typically, the video output from a manually deployed probe is viewed by an operator online with the task of identifying and estimating the location of surface defects such as cracks, corrosion and pitting. However, it is very difficult to estimate the nature and spatial extent of defects from the often disorientating small field of view video of a relatively large structure. This work describes a new visual inspection system incorporating a wide field of view machine vision camera and additional sensors designed for inspecting 3 - 6 inch diameter pipes. The output of the system is a photorealistic model of the internal surface of the pipework. The generation of this model relies upon a core component of the system in the form of image feature extraction which estimates camera location. This paper considers the accuracy of this estimation as a function of the number and configuration of the extracted image features.

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