Maximum Kurtosis Principle for the Parameter Selection of Gabor Wavelet and Its Application to Ultrasonic Signal Processing

The noise suppression techniques with wavelet transform (WT) are widely used in nondestructive testing and evaluation (NDT&E), especially in ultrasonics. But the wavelet based filter has the property of equal Q-factor, so, it is impossible to choose the central frequency and the bandwidth arbitrarily at the same time. This paper develops a new technique using WT to eliminate this drawback. In this paper, a weak ultrasonic signals identification method by using the optimal parameter Gabor wavelet transform is proposed. We address the choice of the optimal central frequency and bandwidth of the Gabor wavelet using the kurtosis maximization algorithm. The central frequency and bandwidth of the optimal parameter Gabor wavelet matched that of the ultrasonic signal very well. Numerical and experimental results have been presented to evaluate the effectiveness of the optimal parameter Gabor wavelet transform on ultrasonic flaw detection. This technique is a simpler and effective technique for processing heavy noised ultrasonic signals.