arXiv:2610.31704v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-Destructive Inspection (NDI) is a cornerstone of modern quality assurance, critical for ensuring the safety and reliability of infrastructure and manufactured components without causing damage. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the current NDI landscape, analyzing the field through four distinct lenses, namely, computational algorithms, physical techniques, industrial applications, and research objectives. We synthesize a broad range of academic literature to illustrate the rapid evolution from manual, analog interpretation to a digitized, data-centric paradigm known as NDE 4.0. Our analysis highlights the dominance of ultrasound and visual inspection as primary physical techniques, while revealing a significant shift toward deep learning and generative models for automated defect recognition. Despite these technological strides, the industry faces critical bottlenecks, notably the scarcity of standardized open-access data...