Inline Defective Laser Weld Identification by Processing Thermal Image Sequences with Machine and Deep Learning Techniques

The non-destructive testing methods offer great benefit in detecting and classifying the weld defects. Among these, infrared (IR) thermography stands out in the inspection, characterization, and analysis of the defects from the camera image sequences, particularly with the recent advent of deep learning. However, in IR, the defect classification becomes a cumbersome task because of the exposure to the inconsistent and unbalanced heat source, which requires additional supervision. In light of this, authors present a fully automated system capable of detecting defective welds according to the electrical resistance properties in the inline mode. The welding process is captured by an IR camera that generates a video sequence. A set of features extracted by such video feeds supervised machine learning and deep learning algorithms in order to build an industrial diagnostic framework for weld defect detection. The experimental study validates the aptitude of a customized convolutional neural network architecture to classify the malfunctioning weld joints with mean accuracy of 99% and median f1 score of 73% across five-fold cross validation on our locally acquired real world dataset. The outcome encourages the integration of thermographic-based quality control frameworks in all applications where fast and accurate recognition and safety assurance are crucial industrial requirements across the production line.