First steps towards an innovative compressive sampling based-THz imaging system for early crack detection on aereospace plates

The paper deals with the problem of early detecting cracks in composite materials for avionic applications. In particular, the authors present a THz imaging system that exploits compressive sampling (CS) to detect submillimeter cracks with a reduced measurement burden. Traditional methods for THz imaging usually involve raster scan of the issue of interest by means of highly collimated radiations and the corresponding image is achieved by measuring the received THz power in different positions (pixels) of the desired image. As it can be expected, the higher the required resolution, the longer the measurement time. On the contrary, two different approaches for THz imaging (namely, continuous wave and time domain spectroscopy) combined with a proper CS solution are used to assure as good results as those granted by traditional raster scan; a proper set of masks (each of which characterized by a specific random pattern) are defined to the purpose. A number of tests conducted on simulated data highlighted the promising performance of the proposed method thus suggesting its implementation in an actual measurement setup.