Image Denoising of Seam Images With Deep Learning for Laser Vision Seam Tracking

Seam tracking with structured light vision has been widely applied into the robot welding. And the precise laser stripe extraction is the premise of automatic laser vision seam tracking. However, conventional laser stripe extraction methods based on image processing have the shortcomings of poor flexibility and robustness, which are easily affected by considerable image noises in the welding processing, such as arc light, smoke, and splash. To address this issue, inspired by image segmentation, with the strong contextual feature expression ability of deep convolutional neural network (DCNN), a novel image denoising method of seam images is proposed in this paper for automatic laser stripe extraction to serve intelligent robot welding applications, such as seam tracking, seam type detection, weld bead detection, etc. With the deep encoder-decoder network framework, aimed at the information loss issue by multiple convolutional and pooling operations in DCNNs, an attention dense convolutional block is proposed to extract and accumulate multi-scale feature maps. Meanwhile, a residual bi-directional ConvLSTM block (BiConvLSTM) is proposed to effectively learn multi-scale and long-range spatial contexts from local feature maps. Finally, a weighted loss function is proposed for model training to address the class unbalanced issue. Combined with the seam image set, the experimental results show that the proposed image denoising network could correctly extract the laser stripes from seam images which could demonstrate that the proposed method shows a high detection precision and good robustness against the strong image noise interference from welding process.