In order to effectively detect internal defects in polyethylene (PE) pipeline, microwave non-destructive testing technology was used to detect and quantify defects in PE pipelines.A clutter suppression imaging enhancement method based on principal component analysis (PCA) was proposed for extracting defect images from PE pipelines.Threshold segmentation techniques were used to extract defect features from the enhanced images.Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively image PE pipelines and highlight defects.The imaging quality is superior to that of images without clutter suppression.Compared to theoretical values, the average relative error in defect localization is 2.38 mm, and the relative error in area quantification is 13.25%
