This paper discusses possible ways to generate synthetic data and its use cases for damage assessment in aircraft turbines. Synthetic data has many advantages such as exact ground truth and scalable data sets. Using SLAM and SfM, which are 3D construction tools, 3D models can be constructed from 2D monocular borescope videos. A 3D reconstruction of parts of the engine allows us to measure the damage if it exists. But when is the synthetic data "good"? Using the methods SLAM and SfM synthetic data could possibly be evaluated by comparing it to real data. Using Blender, synthetic borescope videos are generated and the performance of SLAM and SfM on these videos is compared to the real videos. In general, there are many different use cases for synthetic data in damage assessment and there are multiple ways to generate the right data set. Evaluating synthetic data shows that synthetic data that qualitatively looks closer to real data does not perform closer when running SfM or SLAM on it.

With 3D reconstruction from borescope videos of jet engines, inspections can be made more efficient. Being able to reconstruct 3D models of the jet engines potentially contributes to making the inspections autonomous. Methods that will be used for this reconstruction require to be evaluated to ensure the accuracy of the 3D models that they create. Therefore, this study investigates how a 3D reconstruction method can be quantitatively evaluated using ground truth. From the results can be concluded that 3D models that represent ground truth data can be generated using a combination of manual and algorithmic feature matching between the frames of borescope videos. Furthermore, the Wasserstein distance is found to potentially be a viable measure for quantifying the comparison between 3D models, which is needed for assessment.

To aid in damage assessment, creating 3D reconstruction from borescope videos of jet engines could be very beneficial. However, jet engines often have shiny and non-textured surfaces, and the performance of 3D reconstruction methods is unknown in this case. This paper aims to qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate Structure from Motion (SfM) on these borescope videos. SfM is a technique for 3D reconstruction that uses collections of images to create 3D models. An evaluation was done on borescope videos with differing characteristics using SIFT, SuperGlue, and ground truth for feature detection. Even though small experiments with the global SfM approach produced insufficient results, more extensive experiments using incremental SfM show promising performance on borescope videos and potential for accurate damage assessment, especially when combined with multi-view stereo.