US Patent 8692887 Thermal imaging method and apparatus for evaluating coatings

An apparatus is provided for determining variable thickness of a coating on a surface of a substrate using in part a flash-lamp source, capable of generating a thermal pulse at the coating surface, and a image capture and processing device capable of capture sequential image frames of the coating surface, whereas each sequential image frame corresponds to an elapsed time and comprises a pixel array, and wherein each pixel of the array corresponds to a location on the coating surface. A method of calculating coating thickness is also provided.