A CMOS Visual Sensing System for Welding Control and Information Acquirement in SMAW Process

A sequential research work on visual information of manual arc welding pool dynamics are presented in this paper. An optical inspection system, for monitoring the shielded manual arc welding (SMAW) process is described. The system consisted of a vision sensor that consisted of a Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) camera and lenses, image processing algorithms, and a computer controller. During welding, an image of the weld pool and its vicinity was captured when basic current of welding power. Experimental results showed that the temperature signal varies greatly in the case of instabilities of the weld pool that cause weld defects. The visual information acquirement methods are focused in computer vision sensing, image processing and characteristic extraction of the weld pool surface from the single-item pool images by particular algorithms control strategies are developed to control welding pool dynamics during SMAW.