Measurement of Welding Dilution from Images

using Active Contours

Pedro Pedrosa Rebouças Filho, Tarique da Silveira Cavalcante, Victor Hugo Costa
de Albuquerque, João Manuel R. S. Tavares, Paulo César Cortez

Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, Portugal

tavares@fe.up.pt, www.fe.up.pt/~tavares
Outline
• Introduction
– Dilution rate

– Objectives

• Materials and Methods

– System developed

– Active Contours

• Results and Discussion

• Conclusions
Measurement of Welding Dilution from Images using Active Contours 2
Introduction

• Dilution is the amount of the base metal that is melted and

participates in the constitution of the welding metal
• To measure the dilution, the areas of welding metal and
penetration should be identified and segmented and their
values co-related
• The dilution value varies according to the used welding process,
type of join, pre-heating temperature, consumable, parameters
of welding, among other factors
Welding Metal
Penetration

Heat Affected Zone (HAZ)

Base Metal
Measurement of Welding Dilution from Images using Active Contours 3
Introduction

• Most joint welding applications involving structural steels or

mechanical construction steels of low carbon content do not
present any type of problem dependent on the dilution value
• However, when the welding is dissimilar (i.e. when one of the base
materials or the consumable used presents dissimilar composition
relatively to the others), problems of high dilution can appear
• Additionally, in mechanical industry, there are numerous
examples in which the dilution of certain base metal alloying
or carbon elements on the welding metal can promote
disastrous effects

Measurement of Welding Dilution from Images using Active Contours 4

Introduction

• The dilation value can vary from low percentages,

recommended for coating welding, up to 100%, in autogenic
welding (without consumable addition), being its value in the range
of 20 to 40% for the most frequent joint processes
• This work had as main objective the development and
analysis of a computational system able to determine the area
of penetration and the area of the welding metal in order to
obtain the dilution rate

Penetration

Measurement of Welding Dilution from Images using Active Contours 5

Introduction

• The results obtained by the new system were compared with

the ones obtained by a commercial system common used in
this domain and that can measure the dilution rate in manual
or semi-automatic mean
• The analysis of the results obtained was carried out by a
welding expert

Measurement of Welding Dilution from Images using Active Contours 6

Materials and Methods

• The developed system was implemented in C++ and has a

user friendly interface
• In the image segmentation task, the active contours’ method
(a very common technique used in the Computational Vision field to
segment interest objects represented in images), was adopted
• The images used in the experiments were obtained using
stereoscopy from welding joins involving different types of
steels and simple deposit

Measurement of Welding Dilution from Images using Active Contours 7

Materials and Methods

• Active Contours
– The active contours’ method is initiated by
defining a contour around the object of
interest in the original image
– Then, the initial contour is deformed due to forces acting on it,
moving it towards the object’s borders, by successive iterations
driven to minimize the contour’s energy
– In this work the Greedy active contours’ method was used
– There are several ways to define the image energy function for
Greedy active contours, but in order to establish an adequate
definition for the case considered here, the curve attraction is
considered driven by image dominant characteristics as
intensity edges and terminations
Measurement of Welding Dilution from Images using Active Contours 8
Materials and Methods

• To begin the measurement of the dilution rate using the

developed system, the user starts by selecting the input image
• Then, two points near the extremities of the welding metal
should be selected
– These points are used to define an ellipse for the initial snake’s contour
• Afterward, the user applies the active contours’ method and
waits until the region of the welding metal is completely outlined

Measurement of Welding Dilution from Images using Active Contours 9

Materials and Methods

• Finally, the user can visualize the areas involved in the calculus
of the dilution rate and the accomplished value
– The strait line that divides the two regions involved is automatically
defined by searching for the correspondent points in the final snake’s
contour that are later used to perform a linear regression and
establish the equation of that line

Measurement of Welding Dilution from Images using Active Contours 10

Results and Discussion

• The manual measurement of the dilution rate using the

commercial system, here considered for comparison purpose,
is slower and more dependent on the user than the
developed system (since the user should select several points in the
input image in order to obtain accurate results)

Measurement of Welding Dilution from Images using Active Contours 11

Results and Discussion

• The commercial system has also a semi-automatic

measurement approach
• When that approach is selected, the user should click inside
the welding metal area and wait for the system to segment
the involved areas
• Often, the segmentations accomplished are wrong and
consequently, need to be manually improved (which does not
happen with the developed system)

Measurement of Welding Dilution from Images using Active Contours 12

Results and Discussion

• Analyzing the results obtained from twenty welding sample

images, using the developed system and the commercial
system, in its manual and semi-automatic approaches, one
can conclude that the results on welding dilation rate are very
similar
• However, the developed system is faster, more robust and
easier to use

Measurement of Welding Dilution from Images using Active Contours 13

Conclusions

• The conventional manual measurement of the dilution rate

demands operator’s high attention, skill and precision
• Furthermore, when applied in large series it becomes very
tiring and tedious and, therefore, very often leads to errors
• The commercial software, here considered for comparison
purpose and commonly used by welding field’s professionals,
presents results faster than the conventional method
• However, the commercial system has complex procedures and
fails very often in the segmentation of the input images

Measurement of Welding Dilution from Images using Active Contours 14

Conclusions

• In order to make the dilution rate measurement easier, faster,

more precise and robust to segmentation errors, as well as
more efficient, less tiresome and user’s experience
dependent, a dedicated computational system was
developed, based on the active contours’ method
• The developed system can achieve the welding dilution
measurement in a semi-automatic manner from images and,
from the experimental tests accomplished, one can conclude
that it obtains very good results

Measurement of Welding Dilution from Images using Active Contours 15

 Measurement of Welding Dilution from Images
using Active Contours
Pedro Pedrosa Rebouças Filho, Tarique da Silveira Cavalcante, Victor Hugo Costa
de Albuquerque, João Manuel R. S. Tavares, Paulo César Cortez

Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, Portugal

tavares@fe.up.pt, www.fe.up.pt/~tavares