An in situ surface defect detection method based on improved you only look once algorithm for wire and arc additive manufacturing

PurposeWire and arc additive manufacturing (WAAM) is a widely used advanced manufacturing technology. If the surface defects occurred during welding process cannot be detected and repaired in time, it will form the internal defects. To address this problem, this study aims to develop an in situ monitoring system for the welding process with a high-dynamic range imaging (HDR) melt pool camera. Design/methodology/approachAn improved you only look once version 3 (YOLOv3) model was proposed for online surface defects detection and classification. In this paper, improvements were mainly made in the bounding box clustering algorithm, bounding box loss function, classification loss function and network structure. FindingsThe results showed that the improved model outperforms the Faster regions with convolutional neural network features, single shot multibox detector, RetinaNet and YOLOv3 models with mAP value of 98.0% and a recognition rate of 59 frames per second. And it was indicated that the improved YOLOv3 model satisfied the requirements of real-time monitoring well in both efficiency and accuracy. Originality/valueExperimental results show that the improved YOLOv3 model can solve the problem of poor performance of traditional defect detection models and other deep learning models. And the proposed model can meet the requirements of WAAM quality monitoring.