Abstract Structure-borne acoustic emission (AE) measurement shows major advantages regarding quality assurance and process control in industrial applications. In this paper, laser beam welding of steel and aluminum was carried out under varying process parameters (welding speed, focal position) in order to provide data by means of structure-borne AE and simultaneously high-speed video recordings. The analysis is based on conventionally (e.g. filtering, autocorrelation, spectrograms) as well as machine learning methods (convolutional neural nets) and showed promising results with respect to the use of structure-borne AE for process monitoring using the example of spatter formation.