AbstractThe investigation presented in this paper aims on a quantitative analysis of spatter formation in laser beam welding with superposed beam oscillation. After a discussion of design space limitations, which result from the scanner dynamics and theoretical considerations on the welding process itself, an optimal experimental design is created. By the use of high speed camera imaging, spatters were captured during statistically designed welding experiments and correlations between the number of spatters and the welding parameters have been derived. To evaluate the spatter characteristics in the high speed videos, a state space approach was applied, which is based on automated image data processing.