Seam Tracking Technology for Hyperbaric Underwater Welding

Automatic weld seam tracking technology to be used in hyperbaric underwater damaged pipeline repair welding is much more important, because of poor bevel preparation and severe working condition. A weld seam tracking system based on digital signal processing(DSP) passive light weld image processing technology has been established. A convenient charge coupled device(CCD) camera system was used in the high pressure environment with the help of an aperture and focus altering mechanism to guarantee overall image visibility in the scope of pressure below 0.7 MPa. The system can be used in the hyperbaric environment to pick up the real welding image of both the welding arc and the welding pool. The newly developed DSP technology was adopted to achieve the goal of system real time characteristics. An effective weld groove edge recognition technique including narrow interesting window opening, middle value wave filtering, Sobel operator weld edge detecting and edge searching in a defined narrow area was proposed to remove the guide error and system accuracy was ensured. The results of tracking simulation and real tracking application with arc striking have. proved the validity and the accuracy of the mentioned system and the image processing method.