Audio-visual cross-modality knowledge transfer for machine learning-based in-situ monitoring in laser additive manufacturing

Various machine learning (ML)-based in-situ monitoring systems have been developed to detect laser additive manufacturing (LAM) process anomalies and defects. Multimodal fusion can improve in-situ monitoring performance by acquiring and integrating data from multiple modalities, including visual and audio data. However, multimodal fusion employs multiple sensors of different types, which leads to higher hardware, computational, and operational costs. This paper proposes a cross-modality knowledge transfer (CMKT) methodology that transfers knowledge from a source to a target modality for LAM in-situ monitoring. CMKT enhances the usefulness of the features extracted from the target modality during the training phase and removes the sensors of the source modality during the prediction phase. This paper proposes three CMKT methods: semantic alignment, fully supervised mapping, and semi-supervised mapping. Semantic alignment establishes a shared encoded space between modalities to facilitate knowledge transfer. It utilizes a semantic alignment loss to align the distributions of the same classes (e.g., visual defective and audio defective classes) and a separation loss to separate the distributions of different classes (e.g., visual defective and audio defect-free classes). The two mapping methods transfer knowledge by deriving the features of one modality from the other modality using fully supervised and semi-supervised learning. The proposed CMKT methods were implemented and compared with multimodal audio-visual fusion in an LAM in-situ anomaly detection case study. The semantic alignment method achieves a 98.4% accuracy while removing the audio modality during the prediction phase, which is comparable to the accuracy of multimodal fusion (98.2%).