Copyright Ⓒ 2012 JSPE

A05

Measurement of the Spatter Velocity in Fine Laser Cutting

Okayama University ○Jari Tapani Kolehmainen, Yasuhiro Okamoto, Hibiki Yamamoto,

Akira Okada and Timo Tapani Viitanen

In fine laser cutting, the surface quality is affected by the spatter removed from the kerf. Spatter characteristics depend
mainly on the laser irradiation conditions and the flow properties of the assist gas. Moreover, these flow properties are
mainly affected by the pressure of gas and the shape of nozzle. However, nozzle optimization requires measurements of
material removal in the laser cutting, which are difficult to obtain due to the relatively short time window and small
physical size of the cutting process. A novel computer vision method is proposed to measure the velocity distribution of
spatter in a laser cutting process. Two high-speed video cameras were used to obtain different views of the cutting zone.
Particles in the videos were detected using a Scale-Invariant Feature Transform detector and tracked using a sequential
Monte-Carlo method. The 3D trajectories of particles were reconstructed from the 2D trajectories with an unscented
Kalman filter. The performance of the proposed method was discussed using computer-generated videos with synthetic
ground truth, and the proposed method was applied to measure the spatter velocity distributions in actual laser cutting
process. The proposed system is able to obtain measurements at a wide range of cutting parameters.

1. Introduction
Recently, the laser beam processing has been widely used for
the high-technical products, and the high-quality surface without
dross, spatter and debris is required after the processing in these
industries. The cutting characteristics such as dross height and
material removal efficiency are dependent on the assist gas velocity
at the workpiece1). The assist gas velocity can be generally
increased by increasing the pressure of assist gas, while this
simultaneously leads to increase of the assist gas consumption.
Another way to improve cut characteristics is to design an assist
gas nozzle with respect to a given working pressure. Fig. 1 Illustration of laser cutting from the
In the laser processing, the spatter behaviour would be observation view
influenced by the pressure due to vaporization and plasma
generation, and it is important to understand the gas flow around
the laser irradiated point for the high-quality surface after the
processing. It is possible to simulate assist gas flow with a CFD
software, while the actual metal-gas intersection in the kerf is hard
to predict due to the multiphase nature of the problem. Moreover,
observations of the material removal from the kerf are challenging,
because the time window is short and physical size of the
processing area is small.
Therefore, in this study, two high-speed video cameras are used
to obtain different views of the cutting zone. Particles in the videos
are detected using a SIFT (Scale-Invariant Feature Transform3))
feature detector and tracked using a sequential Monte Carlo
method. The 3D trajectories of particles are reconstructed from the Fig. 2 Illustration of measurement setup
2D trajectories with an unscented Kalman filter. The performance
of the proposed method was discussed using computer-generated
videos with synthetic ground truth, and the proposed method was
applied to measure the spatter velocity distribution of the laser
cutting process.

2. Experimental setup
2.1 Measurement setup
As velocity of spatter varies, it is assumed that magnitude of
velocity has a generalized gamma distribution, and it was further Fig. 3 Flow chart of velocity computation
investigated. Spatter was observed using two high speed video
cameras with frame rate of 1Mfps. Light sources were halogen small black points against grey background in the videos. View
lamps. Moreover a green additive filter was employed to decrease from a single camera is illustrated in Figure 1. Workpiece was
the effect of plasma in the videos. Actual spatter can be observed as located horizontally to the cameras and laser beam was irradiated

2012 年度精密工学会春季大会学術講演会講演論文集
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 Copyright Ⓒ 2012 JSPE

A05

from the top of the workpiece. The measurement setup is illustrated

in Figure 2. Halogen lamps, workpiece and video cameras were in
a same plane, vertical to the operating laser.

2.2 Velocity extraction from the videos

In each video, particles were detected using SIFT-features. Most
SIFT-features corresponded with real particles and false particles
could be recognized at the actual tracking stage. After finding a
particle, it was tracked using a particle filter 4) backward and
forward in the video until it could not be observed or the
covariance of the solution grew above a given threshold. The Fig. 4 Tracking of single particle in actual videos
particle filter used template matching, mean intensity comparing
and background colour to differentiate particles from the
background. The background colour was chosen by histogram
normalization. This procedure produces two sets of 2D trajectories
inside the videos.
The camera setup was calibrated using Zhang’s method5).
Tracks were matched using the epipolar constraint6) and 3D
trajectories were reconstructed from the corresponding 2D
trajectories using an unscented Kalman filter (UKF) 7). Since the
frame rate of the videos was known, the velocity of a particle at
each time step could be computed from the corresponding
positions. Since the position of a particle is subject to noise caused
by the tracking method and the observation method, an average
velocity over some time window was used as the actual initial
velocity. A flow chart of the method described above is given in
Figure 3. Fig. 5 Histograms of spatter velocity and generalized
gamma distribution
3. Results and discussion
3.1 Test of the method with synthetic date proposed method is able to achieve reasonable accuracy. Our
The proposed method was tested using synthetic data, where proposal observation and tracking method could measure the
real 3D location was known. The data featured eight randomly velocity of individual spatter. The velocity distribution of spatter
sized particles experiencing normally distributed random could be obtained, and the velocity of spatter was mainly less than
acceleration. The method successfully reconstructed the path of the speed of sound. Moreover, the obtained velocity distribution
each particle. Larger particles show a small zigzag movement suggests that the statistical bias introduced by the method is small.
caused by movement of the solution inside the particle. However
this phenomenon nullifies when the same particle is tracked References
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