The detection of keyhole-induced pore positions is a critical procedure for assessing laser welding quality. Considering the detection error due to pore migration and noise interference, this research proposes a regional prediction model based on the time–frequency-domain features of the laser plume. The original plume signal was separated into several signal segments to construct the morphological sequences. To suppress the mode mixing caused by environmental noise, variational modal decomposition (VMD) was utilized to process the signals. The time–frequency features extracted from the decomposed signals were acquired as the input of a backpropagation (BP) neural network to predict the pore locations. To reduce the prediction error caused by pore migration, the effect of the length of the signal segments on the prediction accuracy was investigated. The results show that the optimal signal segment length was 0.4 mm, with an accuracy of 97.77%. The 0.2 mm signal segments failed to eliminate the negative effects of pore migration. The signal segments over 0.4 mm resulted in prediction errors of small and dense pores. This work provides more guidance for optimizing the feature extraction of welding signals to improve the accuracy of welding defect identification.
