Unsupervised 3d modeling and geometric measurement of parts built with powder bed fusion-based additive manufacturing

A method for unsupervised 3D modeling and geometric measurement of additively manufactured parts, the method comprising:

• obtaining a plurality of near-infrared (NIR) images for a welding process, wherein each NIR image corresponds to a respective layer after melting of the respective layer during the welding process for a welded part, and wherein the welded part includes welded metal and agglomerated powder particles that are sintered or bonded to edges of melt areas;
• generating a multi-dimensional dataset based on the plurality of NIR images, including cropping the multi-dimensional dataset to a region of interest, wherein the multi-dimensional dataset includes as many image layers as a number of images in the plurality of NIR images;
• detecting melted regions in each image layer of the multi-dimensional dataset to obtain an output volume;
• detecting agglomerated powder in the output volume to obtain melt masks, wherein each melt mask indicates weld pixels for a respective image layer;
• and
• applying a multi-layer predictive model to account for multi-layer weld penetration, based on the melt masks, to obtain an output data mask that represents a 3D model and geometric measurements for the welded part.