African Fusion June 2015

and digital devices to be treated identically and compared side by side, which is an integral step in enabling digital technology to be fully adopted,” he says, before adding, “Can you imag- ine how many rows of boxes and filing cabinets can be emptied by digi- tising all the films being stored?” As well as digitising the film image, the DI- CONDE standard is also able to capture the meta-

ibility protocol for the medical imaging profession. “But for the first five years, the focus was on the choice between CR or DR technology and the bridge to film was seen as less important. Today all of the major medical digital imaging pro- viders also provide scanners to convert existingX-rays into theequivalent DICOM digital format,” DICOM was the forefather of the file format chosen for industrial NDT systems, DICONDE (Digital Imaging and Communications for Non-Destructive Evaluation) a standard established by the ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials). Describing how DICONDE is used, Beaugrand says that Larivière is cur- rently digitising all of the historic film for one of its large pipeline construction clients. Using a service vehicle fitted with its VIDAR NDTPRO industrial film digitiser, inspection personnel go into the field and systematically digitise the film archives. “This solution fixes all compatibility problems between the technologies and enables compatible workflows to be employed for film-, CR- or DR-based images,” he assures. “It enables images produced from film

Once digitised, all of the key advantages of digital systems apply: the brightness and contrast can be very easily adjusted to suit different areas of the image; magnification is easy; the image can be enhanced and processed; measurements can be applied and used in calculations and statistics; and annotations and stamps (metadata) can easily be incorporated directly into the image file.

of the VIDARNDT PRO, he says that this system offers the NDT industry “a product that not only carries a smaller price tag, but is lighter and has a smaller footprint.” The digitiser can handle film as narrow as 2.36̋ wide and up to 51̋ long. It also features VIDAR’s high- definition CCD (HD-CCD™) solid-state technology, aswell as its ADC (automatic digitiser calibration) mechanism, which virtually eliminates variation in image quality and ensures excellent greyscale reproduction.

data associatedwith an image. Reports, measurements andall of the advantages of digital systems can also, therefore, be applied. “DICONDE and associated film digitisation solutions ensure compat- ibility between the existing NDT world and all future digital systems. In com- patibility tests between seven leading equipmentmanufacturers, imageswere found to be 100% compatible with all brands of digital imaging systems and software,” he assures. Describing the specific advantages

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June 2015

AFRICAN FUSION