Layer-wise anomaly detection and classification for powder bed additive manufacturing processes: A machine-agnostic algorithm for real-time pixel-wise semantic segmentation

Increasing industry acceptance of powder bed metal Additive Manufacturing requires improved real-time detection and classification of anomalies. Many of these anomalies, such as recoater blade impacts, binder deposition issues, spatter generation, and some porosities, are surface-visible at each layer of the building process. In this work, the authors present a novel Convolutional Neural Network architecture for pixel-wise localization (semantic segmentation) of layer-wise powder bed imaging data. Key advantages of the algorithm include its ability to return segmentation results at the native resolution of the imaging sensor, seamlessly transfer learned knowledge between different Additive Manufacturing machines, and provide real-time performance. The algorithm is demonstrated on six different machines spanning three technologies: laser fusion, binder jetting, and electron beam fusion. Finally, the performance of the algorithm is shown to be superior to that of previous algorithms presented by the authors with respect to localization, accuracy, computation time, and generalizability.