Visual Tracking System for Welding Seams

To track the narrow butt welding seams in container manufacture,a visual tracking system based on smart camera is proposed in this paper.A smart camera is used as the sensor to detect the welding seam.The feature extraction algorithm is designed with the consideration of the characteristics of the smart camera,which is used to compute the error between the welding torch and the welding seam.Visual control system based on image is presented,which employs a programmable controller to control a stepper motor to eliminate the tracking error detected by the smart camera.Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the vision system.