Texture-Driven Image Clustering in Laser Powder Bed Fusion

The additive manufacturing (AM) field is striving to identify anomalies in laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) using multi-sensor in-process monitoring paired with machine learning (ML). In-process monitoring can reveal the presence of anomalies but creating a ML classifier requires labeled data. The present work approaches this problem by printing hundreds of Inconel-718 coupons with different processing parameters to capture a wide range of process monitoring imagery with multiple sensor types. Afterwards, the process monitoring images are encoded into feature vectors and clustered to isolate groups in each sensor modality. Four texture representations were learned by training two convolutional neural network texture classifiers on two general texture datasets for clustering comparison. The results demonstrate unsupervised texture-driven clustering can isolate roughness categories and process anomalies in each sensor modality. These groups can be labeled by a field expert and potentially be used for defect characterization in process monitoring