Automatic detection of defective welding electrode tips using color segmentation and Hough circle detection

The quality of a welded spot depends on the current, voltage, welding force, the welding duration and most importantly is the quality of the electrode tip that is used. Worthy of noting is that during welding, as the area of electrode contact area changes, current and force also changes. This paper proposes major defects like burr, dirt or small chip that represent a degradation in the quality of welded spots. There exist some similar researches to assess the quality of the electrode tip. However, those all are not targeting to detect specific region of the defects, but only to measure the size of the tip. A method using color segmentation and Hough circle detection is proposed in this paper to detect whether the electrode tip has any defect. The vision system detects the faults by combining a circle detection algorithm and a morphological algorithm.