Feature extraction in laser welding processes

There is a rapidly growing demand for laser welding in a wide variety of manufacturing processes ranging from automobile production to precision mechanics. Up to now, the high dynamics of the process has made it impossible to construct a camera based real time quality and process control. Since new pixel parallel architectures are existing, which are now available in systems such as the ACE16k, Q-Eye, and SCAMP-3 (P. Dudek et al., 2006), one has become able to implement a real time laser welding processing. In this paper we will propose a feature extraction algorithm, running at a frame rate of 10 kHz, for a laser welding process. The performance of the algorithm has been studied in detail. In particular, it has been implemented on an Eye-RIS v.1.1 system and has been applied to laser welding processes.