Method for identifying and characterizing, by means of artificial intelligence, surface defects on an object and cracks on brakes discs subjected to fatigue tests

A method for identifying and characterizing surface defects on an object, comprising the steps of:

• acquiring at least one digital image of the object or of a part of the object on which surface defects must be identified;
• providing said at least one acquired digital image to an algorithm trained by means of artificial intelligence and/or machine learning techniques;
• identifying one or more surface defects present in the at least one acquired digital image, by means of said trained algorithm, and generating digital information related to each identified surface defect;
• for each identified surface defect, determining at least one respective dimensional parameter, representative of at least one dimension of the surface defect, and at least one respective positional parameter, representative of a position of the surface defect with respect to a reference point or line present in the image or to a two-dimensional spatial coordinate system associated with said reference point or line, said determining step being performed through a further processing of said digital information, by electronic processing means;
• wherein said trained algorithm is an algorithm trained by means of a preliminary training step, based on a training dataset comprising digital training images, which are supplied as input to the algorithm to be trained, representing objects of the same type as the objects on which the surface defects must be identified and characterized, said objects having surface defects whose respective size parameter and respective positional parameter are known, which are also provided as input to the algorithm to be trained.