Tool Wear Monitoring in Milling Based on Fine-Grained Image Classification of Machined Surface Images

Cutting tool wear state assessment during the manufacturing process is extremely significant. The primary purpose of this study is to monitor tool wear to ensure timely tool change and avoid excessive tool wear or sudden tool breakage, which causes workpiece waste and could even damage the machine. Therefore, an intelligent system, that is efficient and precise, needs to be designed for addressing these problems. In our study, an end-to-end improved fine-grained image classification method is employed for workpiece surface-based tool wear monitoring, which is named efficient channel attention destruction and construction learning (ECADCL). The proposed method uses a feature extraction module to extract features from the input image and its corrupted images, and adversarial learning is used to avoid learning noise from corrupted images while extracting semantic features by reconstructing the corrupted images. Finally, a decision module predicts the label based on the learned features. Moreover, the feature extraction module combines a local cross-channel interaction attention mechanism without dimensionality reduction to characterize representative information. A milling dataset is conducted based on the machined surface images for monitoring tool wear conditions. The experimental results indicated that the proposed system can effectively assess the wear state of the tool.