Patent ID: 8626459

Claim:
A system comprising: at least one generator configured to apply energy to an object at an application point to cause waves to travel, at least partly, through the object; at least one detector configured to detect at least a portion of the waves traveling through the object; and a statistical analyzer configured to perform a statistical analysis based on an output produced by the at least one detector in response to the detected portion of the waves, the statistical analysis being used to determine whether at least one defect is present in the object, wherein the statistical analysis performs on the output of the at least one detector one or more of an outlier analysis, a discordancy test, and an anomaly detection, by at least computing one or more variation values between feature values of the detected portion of the waves and corresponding baseline feature values computed for a defect-free section of a representative object having a profile substantially similar to the profile of the object, and wherein the feature values include one or more of a root-mean square of an amplitude of the detected portion of the waves, a variance of the amplitude of the detected portion of the waves, a cross-correlation value of the amplitude of the detected portion of the waves, an auto-correlation value of the amplitude of the detected portion of the waves, a peak-to-peak value of the amplitude of the detected portion of the waves, a peak value of the amplitude of the detected portion of the waves, a Kurtosis value of the amplitude of the detected portion of the waves, a time-domain statistical moment corresponding to properties of the detected portion of the waves, a frequency-domain statistical moment corresponding to the properties of the detected portion of the waves, and one or more normalized values of one or more of the feature values.