A Study of an Online Tracking System for Spark Images of Abrasive Belt-Polishing Workpieces

During the manual grinding of blades, the workers can estimate the material removal rate based on their experiences from observing the characteristics of the grinding sparks, leading to low grinding accuracy and low efficiency and affecting the processing quality of the blades. As an alternative to the recognition of spark images by the human eye, we used the deep learning algorithm YOLO5 to perform target detection on spark images and obtain spark image regions. First the spark images generated during one turbine blade-grinding process were collected, and some of the images were selected as training samples, with the remaining images used as test samples, which were labelled with LabelImg. Afterwards, the selected images were trained with YOLO5 to obtain an optimisation model. In the end, the trained optimisation model was used to predict the images of the test set. The proposed method was able to detect spark image regions quickly and accurately, with an average accuracy of 0.995. YOLO4 was also used to train and predict spark images, and the two methods were compared. Our findings show that YOLO5 is faster and more accurate than the YOLO4 target detection algorithm and can replace manual observation, laying a specific foundation for the automatic segmentation of spark images and the study of the relationship between the material removal rate and spark images at a later stage, which has some practical value.