Progressive tool condition monitoring of end milling from machined surface images

Indirect tool condition monitoring in end milling is inevitable to produce high-quality finished products due to the complexity of end-milling process. Among the various indirect tool condition monitoring techniques, monitoring based on image processing by analyzing the surface images of final product is gaining high importance due to its non-tactile and flexible nature. The advances in computing facilities, texture analysis techniques and learning machines make these techniques feasible for progressive tool flank wear monitoring. In this article, captured end-milled surface images are analyzed using gray level co-occurrence matrix-based and discrete wavelet transform-based texture analyses to extract features which have a good correlation with progressive tool flank wear. Contrast and second diagonal moment are extracted from gray level co-occurrence matrix and root mean square and energy are extracted from discrete wavelet decomposition of end-milled surface images as features. Finally, these four features are utilized to build support vector machine-based regression models for predicting progressive tool flank wear with 94.8% average correlation between predicted and measured tool flank wear values.