  Through capturing spectral data from a wide frequency range along with the
spatial information, hyperspectral imaging (HSI) can detect minor differences
in terms of temperature, moisture and chemical composition. Therefore, HSI has
been successfully applied in various applications, including remote sensing for
security and defense, precision agriculture for vegetation and crop monitoring,
food/drink, and pharmaceuticals quality control. However, for condition
monitoring and damage detection in carbon fibre reinforced polymer (CFRP), the
use of HSI is a relatively untouched area, as existing non-destructive testing
(NDT) techniques focus mainly on delivering information about physical
integrity of structures but not on material composition. To this end, HSI can
provide a unique way to tackle this challenge. In this paper, with the use of a
near-infrared HSI camera, applications of HSI for the non-destructive
inspection of CFRP products are introduced, taking the EU H2020 FibreEUse
project as the background. Technical challenges and solutions on three case
studies are presented in detail, including adhesive residues detection, surface
damage detection and Cobot based automated inspection. Experimental results
have fully demonstrated the great potential of HSI and related vision
techniques for NDT of CFRP, especially the potential to satisfy the industrial
manufacturing environment.
