Pulsed eddy current signal denoising based on singular value decomposition

The noise as an undesired phenomenon often appears in the pulsed eddy current testing (PECT) signal, and it is difficult to recognize the character of the testing signal. One of the most common noises presented in the PECT signal is the Gaussian noise, since it is caused by the testing environment. A new denoising approach based on singular value decomposition (SVD) is proposed in this paper to reduce the Gaussian noise of PECT signal. The approach first discusses the relationship between signal to noise ratio (SNR) and negentropy of PECT signal. Then the Hankel matrix of PECT signal is constructed for noise reduction, and the matrix is divided into noise subspace and signal subspace by a singular valve threshold. Based on the theory of negentropy, the optimal matrix dimension and threshold are chosen to improve the performance of denoising. The denoised signal Hankel matrix is reconstructed by the singular values of signal subspace, and the denoised signal is finally extracted from this matrix. Experiment is performed to verify the feasibility of the proposed approach, and the results indicate that the proposed approach can reduce the Gaussian noise of PECT signal more effectively compared with other existing approaches. © 2016, Shanghai Jiaotong University and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.