Assessing switch weld quality with 3D sensing and machine learning

Abstract

This paper presents a preliminary study for evaluating the quality of welds in thermomagnetic switches using 3D sensing and machine learning techniques. A 3D sensor based on laser triangulation is used to gather the point cloud of the component. The point cloud is then processed to extract hand-crafted signatures for binary classification: defective or nondefective component. Features such as Gaussian and mean curvatures, density, and quadric surface properties, are used for building these significant signatures. Different machine learning models, including decision trees, Support Vector Machines, k-nearest neighbors, random forests, ensemble classifiers, and Artificial Neural Networks, are trained using the built signatures to classify the weld as defective or non-defective. Preliminary results on actual data achieve high classification accuracy (>84%) on all the tested models.