Laser Welding Quality Monitoring via Graph Support Vector Machine With Data Adaptive Kernel

Abstract

Laser welding is a rapidly developing technology that is of utmost importance in a number of industrial processes. The physics of the process has been investigated over the past 50 years and is mostly well understood. Nevertheless, online laser-quality monitoring remains an open issue until today due to its dynamic complexity. This paper is a supplement to existing approaches in the field of in situ and real-time laser-quality monitoring that presents a novel combination of state-of-the-art sensors and machine learning for data processing. The investigations were carried out using laser welding of titanium workpieces. The quality was estimated a posteriori by the visual inspection of cross-sections of the welded joints. Four quality categories were defined to cover the two main laser welding regimes: conduction and keyhole. The signals from the laser back reflection and optical and acoustic emissions were recorded during the laser welding process and were decomposed with the $M$ -band wavelets. The relative energies of narrow frequency bands were taken as descriptive features. The correlation of the extracted features with the laser welding quality was carried out using the Laplacian graph support vector machine classifier. Also, an adaptive kernel for the classifier was developed to improve the analysis of the distributions of the complex features and was constructed from Gaussian mixtures. The presented laser welding setup and the developed adaptive kernel algorithm were able to classify the quality for every $2~\mu \text{m}$ of the welded joint with an accuracy ranged between 85.9% and 99.9%. Finally, the results of the developed adaptive kernel were compared with state-of-the-art machine learning methods.