Optical Inspection for Soldering Fault Detection in a PCB Assembly using Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract: Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has been established as a powerful toolto automate various computer vision tasks without requiring any aprioriknowledge. Printed Circuit Board (PCB) manufacturers want to improve theirproduct quality by employing vision based automatic optical inspection (AOI)systems at PCB assembly manufacturing. An AOI system employs classiccomputer vision and image processing techniques to detect variousmanufacturing faults in a PCB assembly. Recently, CNN has been usedsuccessfully at various stages of automatic optical inspection. However, nonehas used 2D image of PCB assembly directly as input to a CNN. Currently, allavailable systems are specific to a PCB assembly and require a lot ofpreprocessing steps or a complex illumination system to improve theaccuracy. This master thesis attempts to design an effective soldering faultdetection system using CNN applied on image of a PCB assembly, withRaspberry Pi PCB assembly as the case in point.Soldering faults detection is considered as equivalent of object detectionprocess. YOLO (short for: “You Only Look Once”) is state-of-the-art fast objectdetection CNN. Although, it is designed for object detection in images frompublicly available datasets, we are using YOLO as a benchmark to define theperformance metrics for the proposed CNN. Besides accuracy, theeffectiveness of a trained CNN also depends on memory requirements andinference time. Accuracy of a CNN increases by adding a convolutional layer atthe expense of increased memory requirement and inference time. Theprediction layer of proposed CNN is inspired by the YOLO algorithm while thefeature extraction layer is customized to our application and is a combinationof classical CNN components with residual connection, inception module andbottleneck layer.Experimental results show that state-of-the-art object detection algorithmsare not efficient when used on a new and different dataset for object detection.Our proposed CNN detection algorithm predicts more accurately than YOLOalgorithm with an increase in average precision of 3.0%, is less complexrequiring 50% lesser number of parameters, and infers in half the time takenby YOLO. The experimental results also show that CNN can be an effectivemean of performing AOI (given there is plenty of dataset available for trainingthe CNN).