Laser-based precise measurement of tailor welded blanks: a case study

Precise measurement of tailor-welded blanks is crucial for quality control of laser welding. The difficulty in measuring the seam profile of similar gage tailor–welded blanks lies in lacking of solutions to locate their feature points such as those representing the laser stripe. A laser sensor–based method is proposed to measure tailor-welded blanks based on its laser stripe and texture features, from which the proposed algorithm is employed to extract the feature points for seam profile assessment. The algorithm is evaluated on a laser-based weld seam measurement system, the experiment results show that the proposed method measures the tailor-welded blanks with high accuracy and is suitable for online inspection.