Near-infrared vision system for monitoring arc welding processes

Throughout the years, vision, human beings' favourite sense, along with our great capacity to obtain, process and interpret a great amount of visual data, has been a great inspiration for development of techniques and technological devices that reproduce it into a computational system. In welding processes, vision can supply information on inspection and quality of the welded joint, monitoring of parameters, trajectory correction and even study of the phenomena involved in the process. However, the light radiation emitted from the weld arc is a barrier to studies based on the viewing process. One form currently used to visualize the process, without the interference of the arc's light, consists of illuminating the process with the near-infrared (NIR) light and using interference (band pass) filters, around this same wavelength, during acquisition of the images. One solution for the NIR light that is being increasingly used involves the use of high-power laser diodes, of low-cost and less complex installat...