The low-velocity impact response and infrared radiation characteristics of composites have rarely been focused on simultaneously. This study aims to investigate the low-velocity impact response and infrared radiation characteristics of the glass fiber reinforced thermoplastic polypropylene and carbon fiber reinforced thermosetting epoxy resin laminates wildly used in the aircraft industry. The impact tests were conducted at five energy levels. Characterization parameters such as impact load, displacement, and absorbed energy were measured. The damage evolution and damage modes of the laminates were analyzed through active and passive thermography, ultrasonic C-scan, and optical microscope. The results indicate that Thermosets (TS) laminates exhibit better impact resistance, while Thermoplastics (TP) laminates show higher delamination ductility, and the maximum contact force of TP laminates is much smaller than that of the TS laminates under low-velocity impacts, but the low bending stiffness and low ductility of the TP matrix cause the difference in energy absorption level between the two not significant. The temperature characteristic changes of passive infrared thermography heat maps could characterize the damage mode of the laminates. The correlation between the heat maps and the impact characteristic curves is explained; the fluctuation of the impact characteristic curves is directly related to the hot spot characteristics changes of the heat maps. More frequent curve fluctuations correspond to a larger and brighter hot spot on the heat map, which peaks at the maximum impact load after the impact force versus time curve fluctuation cutoff point, the maximum center displacement of the impact force versus displacement curve, and the maximum absorbed energy of the absorbed energy versus time curve.

Aiming at the drawbacks of low contrast and high noise in the thermal images, a novel method based on the combination of the thermal image sequence reconstruction and the first-order differential processing is proposed in this work, which is comprised of the following procedures. Firstly, the specimen with four fabricated defects with different sizes is detected by using pulsed infrared thermography. Then, a piecewise fitting based method is proposed to reconstruct the thermal image sequence to compress the data and remove the temporal noise of each pixel in the thermal image. Finally, the first-order differential processing based method is proposed to enhance the contrast. An experimental investigation into the specimen containing de-bond defects between the steel and the heat insulation layer is carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method via the above procedures. The obtained results show that the proposed method can remove the noise, enhance the contrast, and even compress the data reaching at 99.1%, thus improving the detectability of pulsed infrared thermography on metal defects.