Method of Monitoring Wearing and Breakage States of Cutting Tools Based on Mahalanobis Distance Features

The Mahalanobis distance features proposed by P.C.Mahalanobis, an Indian statistician, can be used in an automatic on-line cutting tool condition monitoring process based on digital image processing. In this paper, a new method of obtaining Mahalanobis distance features from a tool image is proposed. The key of calculating Mahalanobis distance is appropriately dividing the object into several component sets. Firstly, a technique is proposed that can automatically divide the component groups for calculating Mahalanobis distance based on the gray level of wearing or breakage regions in a tool image. The wearing region can be divided into high gray level component group and the tool-blade into low one. Then, the relation between Mahalanobis distance features of component groups and tool conditions is investigated. The results indicate that the high brightness region on the flank surface of the turning tool will change with its abrasion change and if the tool is heavily abraded, the area of high brightness will increase apparently. The Mahalanobis distance features of high gray level component group are related with wearing state of tool and low gray level component group correlated with breakage of tool. The experimental results show that the abrasion of the tool’s flank surface affected the Mahalanobis distances of high brightness component of the tool and the pixels of high brightness component set. Compared with the changes of them, we found that the Mahalanobis distance of high brightness component of the tool was more sensitive to the abrasion of cutting tool than the area of high brightness component set of the tool. Here we found that the relative changing rate of the area of high brightness component set was not quite obvious and it was ranging from 2% to 15%, while the relative changing rate of the Mahalanobis distance in table 1 ranges from 13.9% to 47%. It is 3 times higher than the changing rate of the area.

The Mahalanobis distance features proposed by P.C.Mahalanobis, an Indian statistician, can be used in an automatic on-line cutting tool condition monitoring process based on digital image processing. In this paper, a new method of obtaining Mahalanobis distance features from a tool image is proposed. The key of calculating Mahalanobis distance is appropriately dividing the object into several component sets. Firstly, a technique is proposed that can automatically divide the component groups for calculati...