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Spatter is a cosmetic defect in the welding process, caused by small globules of the weld metal, which solidify on the workpiece, outside of the desired weld area. Visual inspection of spatter is very tedious and time consuming. The paper describes the use of a computer vision system to estimate spatter in butt welds produced by gas metal arc welding (GMAW). Accordingly, an index was used to quantify this spatter. Tests were run on HR1020 steel plates welded by a GMAW process. Based on the data acquired, it was concluded that this spatter index is relatively insensitive to changes in vision system threshold values. It was also proved that the method for quantification of spatter is highly reliable. Different illumination arrangements for the spatter index evaluation were tested, with best results being achieved when using an incandescent light at low angle.