Measuring and qualification on camera recordings in wire arc additive manufacturing monitoring

Wire Arc Additive Manufacturing (WAAM) is one of the emerging technologies which have been demanded from industry. Monitoring the manufacturing process is very important in order to avoid any deposition defects, errors like dimensional errors, detecting problems and also to get better texture recognition and higher performance in WAAM. The thermal cameras are being used to monitor the weld pools in general and the information captured can be processed by using computer programs for different outcomes. In this study, we processed three WAAM videos and calculated the size of the thermal light regions simultaneously to get momentary welding amount in order to measure the welding quality and stability. K-means clustering method and Teh-Chin chain approximation algorithm have been applied to process videos, separately. We found that Teh-Chin chain approximation was 27.5% more successful to detect the thermal light regions.