Feasibility Study of a Structured Light System Applied to Welding Inspection Based on Articulated Coordinate Measure Machine Data

The results of visual inspection of welds in structures and machines depend on both the vision of the inspector and his/her measurement skills. The use of 3-D reconstruction technologies, as the structured light system (SLS), allows the accurate assessment of the weld bead according to the quality criteria. With the proposed procedure in this paper, the extraction of fundamental quality parameters to assess the quality of welds is possible from the 3-D model remotely obtained with the SLS. This procedure enables the extraction of metric information about the thickness and the angle deformation of the welds for each point of the weld and the results can be interpreted both quantitatively (depth map and contour plotted) and qualitatively (by means of a non-dimensional coefficient designed ad-hoc for the evaluation process). Obtained results are validated using a ground truth based on an articulated coordinate measure machine.