A Portable Thermal Imaging Diagnostic System for Automotive Tires

In this project, an innovative portable thermal imaging diagnostic system will be developed to detect faulty or damaged tires on moving trucks. By investigating and integrating a proposed advanced multispectral imagery processing technology, this projectwill result in an innovative portable thermal imaging diagnostic system. The system is comprised of a hand held commercial thermal imaging spectrometer in conjunction with an embedded DSP that processes the sensed data to analyze the thermal image andpredict the time to failure based on the failure's thermal image database. The system is capable of continuous capture of faulty tire imagery across multiple spectral bands and processing the image data to detect, identify, and locate the local heatgeneration. The image processing software utilizes the proposed technologies from related remote sensing applications to perform the image analysis. These techniques are based on the use of Memetic Algorithms. The system is highly portable, providesautomotive tire quality analysis to predict the time to failure of automotive tires, provides high accuracy with low false detection rates, and is cost effective.The system to be developed during this project has excellent commercial potential, especiallyfor civilian and military uses in automobiles and aircraft.