WeldNet: A voxel-based deep learning network for point cloud annular weld seam detection

Weld seam detection is an important part of automated welding. At present, few studies have been conducted on annular weld seams, and a lot of defects exist in the point cloud model of the tube sheet obtained by RGB-D cameras and photography methods. Aiming at the above problems, this paper proposed an annular weld seam detection network named WeldNet where a voxel feature encoding layer was adaptively improved for annular weld seams, the sparse convolutional network and region proposal network (RPN) were used to detect annular weld seam position, and an annular weld seam detection loss function was designed. Further, an annular weld seam dataset was established to train the network. Compared with the random sampling consistency (RANSAC) method, WeldNet has a higher detection accuracy, as well as a higher detection success rate which has increased by 23%. Compared with U-Net, WeldNet has been proven to achieve a better detection result, and the intersection over the union of the weld seam detection is improved by 17.8%.