Unsupervised classification of surface defects in wire rod production obtained by eddy current sensors

An unsupervised approach to classify surface defects in wire rod manufacturing is developed in this paper. The defects are extracted from an eddy current signal and classified using a clustering technique that uses the dynamic time warping distance as the dissimilarity measure. The new approach has been successfully tested using industrial data. It is shown that it outperforms other classification alternatives, such as the modified Fourier descriptors.