Open Access

Peter Josef Haupts, Hammoud Al-Joumaa, Loui Al-Shrouf, Mohieddine Jelali

• This paper presents a comparative study of binarization techniques for automated defect detection in dye penetrant testing (DPT) images. We evaluate established methods, including global, adaptive, and histogram-based thresholding, against three novel machine learning-assisted approaches, Soft Binarization (SoBin), Delta Binarization (DeBin), and Convolutional Autoencoder Binarization (AutoBin), using a real-world dataset from an automated DPT system inspecting stainless steel pipes. Performance is assessed with both pixel-level and region-level metrics, with particular emphasis on the influence of defect saturation. Defect saturation is quantified as the mean saturation value of all pixels belonging to a given defect, and defects are grouped into ten categories spanning from low (60–68) to high (132–140) mean saturation. Our results demonstrate that for lower mean defect saturation values, methods such as AutoBin_Triangle , HSV_global_70 , and SoBin achieve superior Intersection over Union (IoU) and high true positive rates. In contrast, methods based primarily on global thresholding of the saturation channel tend to perform competitively on images with higher defect saturation levels, reflecting their sensitivity to stronger color signals. Moreover, depending on the method, nearly perfect region-level true positive rates ( TPRregion) or minimal false positive rates ( FPRregion) can be attained, emphasizing the trade-off that different models offer distinct strengths and weaknesses, which necessitates selecting the optimal method based on the specific quality control requirements and risk tolerances of the industrial process. These findings underscore the critical importance of defect saturation as a cue for both human and computer vision systems and provide valuable insights for developing robust automated quality control and predictive quality algorithms.