Spatially weighted PCA for monitoring video image data with application to additive manufacturing

Machine vision systems for in-line process monitoring in advanced manufacturing applications have attracted an increasing interest in recent years. One major goal is to quickly detect and localize the onset of defects during the process. This implies the use of image-based statistical process monitoring approaches to detect both when and where a defect originated within the part. This study presents a spatiotemporal method based on principal component analysis (PCA) to characterize and synthetize the information content of image streams for statistical process monitoring. A spatially weighted version of the PCA, called ST-PCA, is proposed to characterize the temporal auto-correlation of pixel intensities over sequential frames of a video-sequence while including the spatial information related to the pixel location within the image. The method is applied to the detection of defects in metal additive manufacturing processes via in-situ high-speed cameras. A k-means clustering-based alarm rule is proposed to provide an identification of defects in both time and space. A comparison analysis based on simulated and real data shows that the proposed approach is faster than competitor methods in detecting the defects. A real case study in selective laser melting (SLM) of complex geometries is presented to demonstrate the performances of the approach and its practical use.