Development of Vision Tools for Welding Applications

In order to adequately support our weld modeling work, new ways of acquiring and analyzing data were required. This involved not only instrumentation of the welding process with a variety of vision tools to provide the data required, but also developing image analysis tools for reducing the data and delivering the data to the modeler in a timely and accurate manner. Temperature and displacement diagnostics have been used most frequently and will be discussed in this paper. The availability and increased speed of workstations have enabled us to extend these tools from use for modeling to weld process control.