SURFACE ANOMALY DETECTION SYSTEM AND METHOD

A system and method is provided to detect surface anomalies. The detection system and method provides the ability to automatically detect and characterize anomalies on a surface, such as detecting and characterizing pitting corrosion on metal surfaces. The surface anomaly detection system and method uses an image of the surface under evaluation. The image data is passed to a noise filter. The noise filter uses an estimated characterization of the background noise to remove the background noise from the image data. The smoothed pixel intensity is then compared to a threshold to identify significant departures. The detected anomalies are then passed to a contour detector, which determines the contours of anomalies in the surface to provide more precise characterization of the detected anomalies. The detected closed contours of anomalies may then be passed to a defect severity estimator that provides an anomaly factor metric.