Uncertainty-Aware Laser Stripe Segmentation with Non-Local Mechanisms for Welding Robots

Published in IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, 2025

Recommended citation: Yixiang Dai, Siang Chen, Tianyu Sun, Zimo Fan, Chun Zhang, Xiaobing Feng, Guijin Wang. (2024). Uncertainty-Aware Laser Stripe Segmentation with Non-Local Mechanisms for Welding Robots. [pdf]

Abstract

The line-structured-light system has been widely adopted for weld seam reconstruction and tracking in intelligent welding robots. However, extracting projected laser stripes from captured images remains a significant challenge due to the presence of intense noises in welding environments. In this work, we propose an uncertainty-aware non-local laser stripe segmentation network(UNLS-Net) to achieve precise laser stripe extraction under real-world, challenging welding conditions. The proposed framework designs an uncertainty-aware policy that refines coarse segmentation results using combined epistemic-aleatoric uncertainty maps. Additionally, non-local attention modules are incorporated to enhance spatial correlation, thereby preserving the continuity of laser stripes. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on our large-scale, shape-diverse laser stripe dataset comprising 3,136 welding images with varying weld seam geometries, sizes, and noise profiles. The proposed method demonstrates superior performance compared to existing segmentation approaches, achieving significant improvements in both laser stripe continuity and denoising effectiveness.