Patent 7064330 was granted and assigned to United Technologies on June, 2006 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A method of detecting defects in structures, comprising the steps of inducing mechanical energy in a structure via the emission of a broad-band acoustic signal, and capturing over a time interval a plurality of images of the structure each of the plurality of images comprised of a plurality of pixels arranged in a plurality of rows and columns each indicative of an intensity of infrared energy emitted by a portion of the structure.