COMPUTER VISION AIDED ELECTRODE WEAR ESTIMATION IN ELECTRICAL DISCHARGE MACHINING PROCESS

Electrical Discharge Machining (EDM) is one of the important processes in machining holes, which is used in wide application in industry. The electrode wear measurement in EDM is a crucial parameter for verification of the efficiency of machining process. The main objective of this work is to develop an approach for electrode wear estimation method using a computer vision technique. The proposed method consists of a Coupled Charged Device camera, arranged for images capturing, and a personal computer. The electrode wear is estimated by means of the decrease of electrode length after EDM, accordingly computer vision aided electrode wear estimation method has been proposed and employed to detect the electrode wear along its length using MATLAB package. The estimation method consists of image preprocessing, image segmentation, image overlapping and subtracting. The Experimental results confirmed the validity of the proposed vision method to achieve the required aim compared with some other used methods. Hence, the proposed vision method used in this work is acceptable, within the accuracy limit of the proposed method, to estimate electrode wear measurement, using relatively inexpensive equipment.