Development of an Automatic Image Cropping and Feature Extraction System for Real-Time Warping Monitoring in 3D Printing

Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) is an additive manufacturing technology that can produce complicated structures in a simple-to-use and cost-effective manner. Although promising, the technology is prone to defects, e.g. warping, compromising the quality of the manufactured component. To avoid the adverse effects caused by warping, this thesis utilizes deep-learning algorithms to develop a warping detection system using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). To create such a system, a real-time data acquisition and analysis pipeline is laid out. The system is responsible for capturing a snapshot of the print layer-bylayer and simultaneously extracting the corners of the component. The extracted region-of-interest is then passed through a CNN outputting the probability of a corner being warped. If a warp is detected, a signal is sent to pause the print, thereby creating a closed-loop monitoring system. The underlying model is tested on a real-time manufacturing environment yielding a mean accuracy of 99.21%.