Inspection of weld shape based on the shape from shading

The weld bead shape is crucial for weld quality. Automatic inspection on the 3D shape of a weld bead is achieved by recording the image of the weld bead with an optical sensing method and then calculating the 3D shape parameters with a shape-from-shading technology based on a single image in the computer-vision domain. The paper first introduces a method of shape from shading based on a single image and puts forward its implementation. It then presents the improved measures of the original algorithm according to the defects of the computed results and finds accuracy compared with the former method by a synthetic image. Finally, the improved algorithm is applied to the surface height reconstruction of weld bead successfully .