Segmentation of Molten Pool Infrared Images Using Morphology during High Power Disk Laser Welding

Abstract

Configuration of a molten pool is related to the laser welding quality. Analyzing the configuration of a molten pool is important to monitor the laser welding process. This paper proposes a method of segmentation of a molten pool and its shadow during high power disk laser welding, consequently provides the groundwork for reconstruction of the molten pool and analysis of welding quality. Subsection linear stretching histogram equalization was applied to enhance the contrast of the original images firstly, and then edge detection was used to highlight the edges. After that we used the morphology filtering method to produce the segmentation mask, and then combined the mask with the original images to get the final segmentation results. Also, the proposed method was compared with other traditional methods. The experimental results showed that our method not only could give better segmentation results and process large quantities images automatically, but also overcame the less-segmentation problems of traditional methods.