Automated Defect Analysis of Additively Fabricated Metallic Parts Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF)-based additive manufacturing (AM) has the flexibility in fabricating parts with complex geometries. However, using non-optimized processing parameters or using certain feedstock powders, internal defects (pores, cracks, etc.) may occur inside the parts. Having a thorough and statistical understanding of these defects can help researchers find the correlations between processing parameters/feedstock materials and possible internal defects. To establish a tool that can automatically detect defects in AM parts, in this research, X-ray CT images of Inconel 939 samples fabricated by LPBF are analyzed using U-Net architecture with different sets of hyperparameters. The hyperparameters of the network are tuned in such a way that yields maximum segmentation accuracy with reasonable computational cost. The trained network is able to segment the unbalanced classes of pores and cracks with a mean intersection over union (mIoU) value of 82% on the test set, and has reduced the characterization time from a few weeks to less than a day compared to conventional manual methods. It is shown that the major bottleneck in improving the accuracy is uncertainty in labeled data and the necessity for adopting a semi-supervised approach, which needs to be addressed first in future research.