No abstract

Large amount of data are generated from in-situ monitoring of additive manufacturing (AM) processes which is later used in prediction modelling for defect classification to speed up quality inspection of products. A high volume of this process data is defect-free (majority class) and a lower volume of this data has defects (minority class) which result in the class-imbalance issue. Using imbalanced datasets, classifiers often provide sub-optimal classification results, i.e. better performance on the majority class than the minority class. However, it is important for process engineers that models classify defects more accurately than the class with no defects since this is crucial for quality inspection. Hence, we address the class-imbalance issue in manufacturing process data to support in-situ quality control of additive manufactured components. For this, we propose cluster-based adaptive data augmentation (CADA) for oversampling to address the class-imbalance problem. Quantitative experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method and to compare with other selected oversampling methods using AM datasets from an aerospace industry and a publicly available casting manufacturing dataset. The results show that CADA outperformed random oversampling and the SMOTE method and is similar to random data augmentation and cluster-based oversampling. Furthermore, the results of the statistical significance test show that there is a significant difference between the studied methods. As such, the CADA method can be considered as an alternative method for oversampling to improve the performance of models on the minority class.

One of the crucial aspects of additive manufacturing is the monitoring of the welding process for quality assurance of components. A common way to analyse the welding process is through visual inspection of melt-pool images to identify possible defects in manufacturing. Recent literature studies showed the potential use of prediction models for defects classification to speed up the manual verification criteria since a huge data is generated from the additive manufacturing. Although a huge image data is available, the data needs to be labelled manually by experts which results in small sample datasets. Hence, to model small sample sizes and also to acquire the importance of parameters, we opted a traditional machine learning method, Random Forests (RF). For feature extraction, we opted for the Polar Transformation to explore its applicability using the meltpool image dataset and a publicly available shape image dataset. The results show that RF models with Polar Transformation performed the best on our case study datasets and the second-best for the public dataset when compared to the Histogram of Oriented Gradients, HARALICK, XY-projections of an image, and Local Binary Patterns methods. As such, the Polar Transformation can be considered as a suitable compact shape descriptor.