Tool wear state recognition based on linear chain conditional random field model

Tool condition monitoring (TCM) system is paramount for guaranteeing the quality of workpiece and improving the efficiency of the machining process. To overcome the shortcomings of Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and improve the accuracy of tool wear recognition, a linear chain conditional random field (CRF) model is presented. As a global conditional probability model, the main characteristic of this method is that the estimation of the model parameters depends not only on the current feature vectors but also on the context information in the training data. Therefore, it can depict the interrelationship between the feature vectors and the tool wear states accurately. To test the effectiveness of the proposed method, acoustic emission data are collected under four kinds of tool wear state and seven statistical features are selected to realize the tool wear classification by using CRF and hidden Markov model (HMM) based pattern recognition method respectively. Moreover, k-fold cross validation method is utilized to estimate the generation error accurately. The analysis and comparison under different folds schemes show that the CRF model is more accurate for the classification of the tool wear state. Moreover, the stability and the training speed of the CRF classifier outperform the HMM model. This method casts some new lights on the tool wear monitoring especially in the real industrial environment. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.