The main subject of this study is the construction of an automatic welding system that has the capability to trace the weld seam in GMA welding of lap joints. The system was composed of a vision sensor, moving torch, and personal computer(IBM-PC). In the developed vision sensor, an image was captured by the frame grabber at the time of short circuit during welding. The threshold method was adopted for determining the structured light and the central difference method for detecting the weld joint. And the seam tracing of the torch was performed by using the data regeneration algorithm. In this system using the image at the time of short circuit, weld seam tracking was performed without any relations to arc light and spatters.