Improving accuracy of automatic optical inspection with machine learning.

Electronic devices require the printed circuit board (PCB) to support the whole structure, but the assembly of PCBs suffers from welding problem of the electronic components such as surface mounted devices (SMDs) resistors. The automated optical inspection (AOI) machine, widely used in industrial production, can take the image of PCBs and examine the welding issue. However, the AOI machine could commit false negative errors and dedicated technicians have to be employed to pick out those misjudged PCBs. This paper proposes a machine learning based method to improve the accuracy of AOI. In particular, we propose an adjacent pixel RGB value based method to pre-process the image from the AOI machine and build a customized deep learning model to classify the image. We present a practical scheme including two machine learning procedures to mitigate AOI errors. We conduct experiments with the real dataset from a production line for three months, the experimental results show that our method can reduce the rate of misjudgment from 0.3%–0.5% to 0.02%–0.03%, which is meaningful for thousands of PCBs each containing thousands of electronic components in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]