Weld pool visual sensing without external illumination

Visual sensing in arc welding has become more and more important, but still remains challenging because of the harsh environment with extremely strong illumination from the arc. This paper presents a low-cost camera-based sensor system, without using external Illumination, but nevertheless able to sense and model the weld pool. Central is a carefully selected optical filtering as well as an active contour-based tracking of the weld pool boundary. The system is able to extract the 2D shape of the weld pool in real time. The reported experiments show the feasibility of this approach.