Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2009) 42:766–771
DOI 10.1007/s00170-008-1640-0
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
A hybrid signal pre-processing approach in processing
ultrasonic signals with noise
S. Palanisamy & C. R. Nagarajah & K. Graves &
P. Iovenitti
Received: 19 December 2007 / Accepted: 25 June 2008 / Published online: 30 July 2008
# Springer-Verlag London Limited 2008
Abstract Ultrasonic techniques have the potential to be
used to detect sub-surface defects in aluminium castings.
However, ultrasonic sensing techniques have not been suc-
cessfully used to detect sub-surface defects in aluminium
die castings with rough surfaces or in the ‘as-cast’ state due
to the poor quality of signals. Ultrasonic signal noise
caused by rough surfaces and grain size variations of the
castings is difficult to eliminate. Hence, there is a need to
process noisy ultrasonic signals to identify defects within
the rough surface castings. This paper documents an
investigation of ultrasonic signal analysis using artificial
neural networks and hybrid signal pre-processing
approaches for the purpose of detecting defects from noisy
ultrasonic signals. In this investigation, ultrasonic signals
were obtained from aluminium castings with different
levels of surface roughness. The signals were first pre-
processed using hybrid signal analysis techniques and then
classified using an artificial neural network classifier. The
hybrid pre-processing techniques utilised various combina-
tions of fast Fourier transform (FFT), wavelet transform
(WT) and principal component analysis. The best signal
classification performance was generally achieved with a
hybrid WT/FFT signal pre-processing technique.
S. Palanisamy (*)
CAST Cooperative Research Centre,
Faculty of Engineering and Industrial Science,
Swinburne University of Technology,
Melbourne, VIC 3122, Australia
e-mail: s.palanisamy@uq.edu.au
S. Palanisamy : C. R. Nagarajah : K. Graves : P. Iovenitti
Industrial Research Institute Swinburne,
Faculty of Engineering and Industrial Science,
Swinburne University of Technology,
Melbourne, VIC 3122, Australia
Keywords Ultrasonic inspection . Castings .
Neural networks . Signal processing
1 Introduction
Castings are less commonly tested by ultrasonic methods
because structural variations usually create high ultrasonic
signal noise [1]. The noise contained in the ultrasonic signal
caused by rough surfaces and grain size variations of
castings are difficult to eliminate. Due to the noise con-
tained within the ultrasonic signals, particularly with rough
surface castings, it is difficult to identify defects even
though a suitable ultrasonic frequency is often selected [2].
Therefore, there is a requirement for signal processing to
aid the process of identifying the defects from noisy signals
associated with rough surface castings. It has also been
shown in previous investigations that the processing of
weak ultrasonic signals obtained from the castings is not
straight-forward [3].
A neural network can be applied to the ultrasonic signal
directly and, by applying suitable training algorithms, it is
possible for the network to discover the inherent features
characterizing the defect signals from the background noise
[4, 5]. A practical drawback of this approach, particularly in
the context of large-scale complex problems such as the one
presented here, is that it may not lead to an optimal
classification outcome. As such, it may be beneficial to
apply suitable pre-processing techniques to the input
signals to achieve improved signal classification.
Research appears to indicate that signal classification
may be more efficient if certain pre-processing steps are
performed, prior to the classification process. In this
research an investigation was carried out to evaluate
whether a combination of pre-processing techniques (rather
Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2009) 42:766–771
than a single pre-processing technique) could lead to an
improvement in the signal classification performance. The
strategy adopted in this research was to apply the more
common signal processing tools such as fast Fourier
transforms (FT), wavelet transforms (WT) and principal
component analysis (PCA) in various combinations to
determine the best approach.
The approach of applying two or more pre-processing
techniques is known as hybrid mode pre-processing. It has
been used to achieve improved signal classification out-
comes, for several applications by applying various
combinations of well known signal processing tools such
as FFT, WT and PCA [6–9]. For example, a combination of
wavelet transform and PCA has previously been applied for
a face recognition application [6]. It was found that the
wavelet preprocessing alone was inefficient due to the
highly redundant nature of the time-frequency inputs [6].
Therefore, the redundant components of the time-frequency
inputs were removed prior to processing, using principal
component analysis. Experiments were carried out to
determine the best wavelet type to use and it was found
that this selection was a critical factor in the effective
combination of wavelet and PCA type signal processing
tools. A recognition success rate of more than 95% was
achieved using the combination of wavelet and PCA
approach [6].
Matalgah and Knopp [7] applied the combination of
wavelet and Fourier transforms for the pre-processing of
simulated and real data examples of non-stationary signals
for applications such as underwater acoustics and phono-
cardiograms. They used WT to represent the time domain
signal components, and FFT to represent the spectral
components of the signal. The results of this approach
demonstrated that improvements in signal processing could
be achieved with a combination of WT and FFT techniques.
Similarly, Wang et al. [8] used a combination of FFT and
WT for a fingerprint image recognition application. The
application of FFT on the high frequency component of
the output from the WT produced improved results. The
Fig. 1 Schematic diagram of
ultrasonic immersion testing
experimental set-up
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feasibility of this approach had been demonstrated using
both experimentation and computer simulation [8].
Palanisamy et al. [10] investigated the application of the
neural network classification approach with and without use
of signal pre-processing techniques (FFT and WT) on the
rough ultrasonic signals. In general, results obtained for
ultrasonic signals obtained from rough surface castings
exhibit a low classification performance when signal pre-
processing is not used. This has emphasised the need for
identifying a suitable signal pre-processing approach for
ultrasonic signals that enables the achievement of a better
classification performance.
2 Experimental procedure
In this investigation, ultrasonic immersion testing experi-
ments were conducted on castings having different surface
roughness values, and further details of the experimental
procedure have been documented previously [11]. In this
investigation, the casting surface had a roughness up to Ra =
150 μm. The ultrasonic inspection parameters such as the
ultrasonic signal velocity in CA313 alloy was 6,260 m/sec,
the water path distance was 7.5 mm and the probe fre-
quency used was 10 MHz [11]. The ultrasonic immersion
testing was carried out on the casting sections using the
experimental set up illustrated in Fig. 1.
From these experiments, a frequency of 10 MHz was
selected to carry out further inspection on the rough surface
castings to detect gas porosity defects that are smaller than
1 mm diameter in size. Frequencies lower than 10 MHz
would generally not allow the detection of smaller defects,
while frequencies higher than 10 MHz would lead to
excessive attenuation of the signal within the casting.
It is difficult to detect any back surface or defect echo in
the ultrasonic signals obtained from castings with rough-
surfaces. This is due to the clustering of the front wall echo
which effectively envelopes the defect signal particularly if
the defect is close to the front surface of the casting.
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Therefore, to identify the defect signal echoes from the
rough surface castings, a suitable signal processing tech-
nique was required to be applied to the ultrasonic signals.
3 Ultrasonic signal processing procedure
Signal pre-processing and classification was carried out
using the neural network toolbox in MATLAB software. A
number of inspection trials were carried out on both
defective and reference castings to provide sufficient
ultrasonic signals for training and testing the neural
network component of the inspection system [10]. A
number of signals have been obtained from simulated
defects (side-drilled holes), natural defects and mixed
defects, i.e. the combination of both side-drilled holes and
gas porosity signal types is presented. In addition to those
signals, 80 non-defect signals were also obtained from Ra0
(Ra =101–150 μm), Ra1 (Ra =51–100 μm) and Ra2 (Ra =1–
50 μm) surface types for defect and no-defect type
classification. Out of 80 non-defect signals obtained, 50
were used for training and 30 for testing. In total, 130
defective signals were obtained from each surface type
(Ra0, Ra1 and Ra2). Out of 130 defective signals obtained,
80 were used for training and 50 for testing each surface
type.
The purpose of using simulated defects in this investi-
gation was to represent the natural defects occurring in
structural oil sump pan castings, which were produced in
high-pressure die casting machines. These defects are
commonly referred to as ‘gas porosity defects’, and may
vary in diameter between 0.5 mm to 2.0 mm. X-ray
inspection was used to accurately verify the location and
size of the natural defects. It was found that these natural
defects were generally un-evenly distributed along the
‘in-gate’ section of the castings.
To determine the optimum neural network classification
performance, network training and validation was under-
taken by varying the number of neurons in the first two
layers of a three-layer, fully connected, feed-forward, neural
network. Further, the number of training epochs and the
training algorithm was also chosen to maximise the
network classification performance without over-training.
This is a well-known procedure which has been followed
by a number of researchers [7, 12]. The parameters that
describe the feed forward neural network used in this
research are shown in Table 1. The selected neural network
topology had 220 input nodes representing the ultrasonic
A-scan signal, and one output neuron to determine whether
the signal represented a defect or not. The outputs ‘0’ and
‘1’ represented the ‘no-defect’ and ‘defect’ categories
respectively. The signals were obtained with an ultrasonic
probe suitable for the die castings investigated in this
Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2009) 42:766–771
Table 1 Feed-forward back propagation neural network parameters
Parameters Value
Number of input nodes 220
Number of layers 3
Number of neurons in input layer 20
Number of neurons in hidden layer 10
Number of neurons in output layer 1
Epochs 500
research. Then, the measured values were sent to the
digital measurement device, Epoch III. The data was
converted in to M-file format for MATLAB neural
network implementation.
Time–frequency analysis was carried out on the non-
stationary ultrasonic signal, which thereby transformed it
into a two-dimensional signal. One dimension was repre-
sented by frequency, and the other by time. This procedure
had the potential to assist a neural network to identify the
salient features of the received signals. As stated by Chen
et al. [6], this approach is inefficient due to the highly
redundant nature of the time–frequency signal. The redun-
dant components of the time–frequency signal can be
removed prior to processing, thereby enhancing the
efficiency of computation. To do so, principal component
analysis was applied to the time–frequency signal.
4 Results
4.1 FFT/PCA
In this hybrid pre-processing method, at first the FFT of the
input signal was obtained. Normally, the highly attenuated
signal is partially embedded in the incoherent backscattered
noise. As the incoherent spatial noise due to surface
roughness could not be eliminated with the FFT alone,
PCA was then applied to remove the redundant noisy
signal. This step also reduced the number of input nodes of
the ANN and therefore assisted the classification process.
The mean classification percentage achieved with this
signal pre-processing approach was 73.3%. Even though
the highest classification achieved was 90.4%, with this
type of pre-processing, the standard deviation was 6.1%.
This classification performance was higher than the PCA
single mode pre-processing method in which the mean
classification performance was 63.6%. The false positive
and false negative percentage values for each surface type
are presented in Table 2.
The application of the FFT/PCA combination resulted in
76.7% classification for smooth surface castings compared
with 73.3% classification for rough surface castings, with a
standard deviation of 8.3% (Table 2). The classification
Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2009) 42:766–771 769

Table 2 Signal classification percentage for FFT/PCA Table 4 Signal classification percentage for WT/FFT

Classification performance Surface roughness Classification performance Surface roughness

Ra0 Ra1 Ra2 Ra0 Ra1 Ra2

Mean (%) 73.3 74.6 76.7 Mean (%) 79.3 83.3 90.6
Standard deviation (%) 8.3 6.4 5.3 Standard deviation (%) 1.9 3.6 3.4
False negative/false positive (%) 15.3/11.4 10.1/15.3 10.0/13.3 False negative/false positive (%) 14.3/6.4 11.6/5.1 6.1/3.3

percentage did not vary significantly for the different
surface types (Ra0, Ra1 and Ra2) with the application of
the FFT/PCA pre-processing approach.
4.2 WT/PCA
Similar to FFT/PCA combination type, in this time–
frequency representation (WT), a PCA was applied to the
wavelet signal to reduce any redundant WT coefficients. In
this investigation, the PCA was applied to the approxima-
tion component of the wavelet coefficients with the suitable
number of principal components because it could eliminate
the unwanted noise from the original signal. The number
of principal components used in this combinational pre-
processing technique was 40. The number of principal
components selected was arrived at after experimentation
with varying numbers of principal components and relating
to signal classification performance. The application of the
wavelet transform, combined with principal component
analysis, lead to only a marginal increase in the classifica-
tion percentage compared to raw signal classification. The
important factor to consider with this classification method
was the large variation in the classification performance
across different training runs, for all the three surface types.
A higher false negative value has been obtained compared
to false positive values for each surface type as shown in
Table 3.
high-pass frequency bands, it was possible to analyse each
frequency band independently. A typical characteristic of
DWT was that in each decomposition stage, due to the
down-sampling operation, the wavelet coefficients of
each layer still contained information of the original
signal. The analysis of the signal was carried out with
Daubechies’ mother wavelet type. Through experimenta-
tion, the Daubechies’ wavelet type (db5) was identified
as the most suitable in achieving the highest possible
classification percentage for both the rough and smooth
surface castings. The application of the db5 wavelet type
on the input signals resulted in the determination of both
detailed and approximate coefficients.
A FFT was then applied on the approximate wavelet
coefficients which retained the time–frequency information
of the original signal in down-sampled form. The power
spectrum of FFT output was then used as an input to the
neural network classifier. The results presented in Table 4
show the mean and standard deviation of the classification
percentages of the ultrasonic signals obtained from three
rough surface types after signal pre-processing using the
WT/FFT combinational approach. A better classification
percentage has been obtained through this pre-processing

4.3 WT/FFT

In this signal pre-processing approach, a WT was applied

to the original ultrasonic signal as a first step of pre-
processing. It was carried out by applying DWT filters.
Since the DWT divided the original signal into low and

Table 3 Signal classification percentage for WT/PCA

Classification performance Surface roughness

Ra0 Ra1 Ra2

Mean (%) 64.6 68.4 73.3

Standard deviation (%) 7.3 6.3 8.5 Fig. 2 Defect classification percentage and standard deviation of
False negative/false positive (%) 22.3/13.1 21.6/10.0 18.4/8.3 different signal pre-processing techniques on Ra0 and Ra2 type
surfaces
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method and it is clearly observed with the lower false
negative values and false positive values (Table 4). How-
ever, in the case of signals without higher frequency
components (low values of WT down-sampling method)
the condition was different and it resulted in a low
classification percentage (see results of various combined
pre-processing techniques in Fig. 2).
Given the importance of developing an inspection
technique for rough surface castings, various pre-processing
combination methods were compared for Ra0 and Ra2 type
surfaces. Figure 2 shows the classification percentage
achieved with different signal pre-processing techniques
applied on the ultrasonic signals. More than 90% classifi-
cation for smooth surface casting signals was achieved only
with the WT/FFT signal pre-processing approach. Figure 2
indicates that the highest classification percentages are
obtained by combining the WT and FFT signal pre-
processing techniques. As such it can be concluded that,
based on consistency of signal classification performance,
the WT/FFT approach to signal pre-processing in com-
bination with a neural network based signal classification
method performs best.
5 Discussion
In this investigation, a number of hybrid signal pre-
processing techniques were applied to ultrasonic signals
with the objective of improving the classification perfor-
mance of a neural network classifier. It was found that the
classification performance obtained by combining WT and
PCA pre-processors was no greater than the performance
of single FFT type pre-processor. It was also found that a
combination of WT and FFT pre-processing techniques
provided an improved classification performance in com-
parison to those involving PCA with either FFT or WT.
The use of either the WT or FFT allows the signal to be
decomposed into its various frequency components. From
this, the network may be able to identify those frequency
components more closely associated with a defect, rather
than background noise.
The application of FFT on a signal processed using WT
(WT/FFT type) has been carried out previously by
Matalgah and Knopp [7] and Wang et al. [8], however,
there were differences in their approaches. Matalgah and
Knopp [7] at first applied a WT, then filtered the wavelet
output signal and then applied an inverse WT. Finally, an
FFT was applied to the WT filtered signal. However, Wang
et al. [8] applied FFT directly on the output signal
processed using WT. The wavelet coefficients were
obtained after down-sampling, and were used for further
signal analysis. The research described here adopted a
similar approach to that of Wang et al. [8], in which a FFT
Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2009) 42:766–771
was applied on the output obtained by processing the
original signal through WT. In this case, the WT acted as a
low pass filter on the raw input signal. Then, the FFT
provided the power spectrum of the filtered signal. Hence,
the combination could be described as the spectrum of
the smooth (filtered) signal, which was used as an input
to the neural network classifier. These two transforms
combined to produce a better solution in both time and
frequency domains as confirmed by the results presented
in this paper.
6 Conclusions
The research described here relates to the investigation of
neural networks and suitable signal pre-processing tech-
niques to process noisy ultrasonic signals from rough
surface castings. The effectiveness of applying a suitable
hybrid signal pre-processing approach along with artificial
neural networks has been demonstrated using three com-
mon pre-processing methods. The research led to the
successful classification of defects from rough surface
castings with roughness values up to 150 μm (Ra0). A
success rate of 79.3% was achieved with pre-processing of
ultrasonic signals using combinations of WT and FFT and
an artificial neural network. The WT/FFT approach pro-
vided superior classification performance compared to
other types of signal pre-processing methods as discussed.
It was also found out that the application of PCA as a pre-
processing tool did not improve the classification perfor-
mance for either smooth or rough surface castings due to
loss of useful signal information.
Acknowledgements The researchers wish to express their gratitude
to the CAST Cooperative Research Centre and the participating
companies Nissan Casting Australia Pty. Ltd., and the Ford Motor
Company Australia Pty. Ltd., for their support and access to testing
equipment and castings. The CAST was established under the
Australian Government’s Cooperative Research Centres Scheme.
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