Bead shape in high frequency electric resistance (HER) pipe welding gives useful information on judging current welding conditon. In most welding process, heat input is controlled by skilled operators observing color and shape of bead. In this paper, a visual monitoring system is designed to observe bead shape in HERW pipe welding process by using structured light beam and a C.I.D(Charge injection device) camera. To avoid some difficul- ties arising in extracting stable features of stripe pattern and classifying the extracted features, Kohonen neural network is used to classify such bead shapes. The experimental results show accurate classification performance of the proposed method.