Online monitoring of weld defects for short-circuit gas metal arc welding based on the self-organizing feature map neural networks

A method for automatic detection of weld defects of short-circuit gas metal arc welding is presented. It is based on the extraction of arc signal features as well as classification of the obtained features using self-organizing feature map (SOM) neural networks in order to get the weld quality information, for example, to determine if there is a defect in the product. This is important for the online monitoring of weld quality especially in robotic welding and lays the foundation for further real-time control of weld quality