Patent 8449176 was granted and assigned to Thermal Wave Imaging, Inc. on May, 2013 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A method for processing thermographic data is disclosed including thermally disturbing a specimen of unknown quality, collecting thermal data from said specimen, converting the collected data into a measure of variance and comparing the variance from the sample of unknown quality against the variance of a sample of known quality in order to determine if the quality of the specimen of unknown quality is acceptable.