Structured Illumination Scanning Thermography (SISTER)

Conventional non-invasive photothermal imaging techniques are fundamentally constrained by the diffusive nature of heat transport, which causes severe energy dissipation during subsurface reconstruction.

Although modulation-based approaches partially mitigate this limitation by encoding depth information into phase delay and amplitude attenuation, they remain inherently restricted by repeated temporal excitation, long acquisition times, and stitching artifacts in large-area inspection.

In this work, we propose a structured illumination scanning thermography (SISTER) framework that replaces conventional temporal modulation with continuous spatial scanning under static structured illumination.

The key theoretical insight is that heat diffusion is governed by a Markov semigroup, while sample motion transforms static spatial illumination into an equivalent temporal excitation through a Galilean coordinate transformation.

This formulation enables dynamic-to-static reconstruction without repeated temporal modulation and provides a unified interpretation of spatial scanning and conventional signal modulation.

A scanning system is integrated to implement the proposed framework together with a dynamic-to-static reconstruction algorithm for continuous subsurface defect inspection.

Both numerical simulations and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves spatial continuity, signal-to-noise ratio, and detection capability while effectively eliminating stitching artifacts and reducing acquisition complexity.

The proposed SISTER framework establishes a unified theoretical foundation for scanning photothermal imaging and provides a practical paradigm for high-efficiency, large-scale industrial non-destructive testing.