Design and development of automatic visual inspection system for PCB manufacturing

Inspection of solder joints has been a critical process in the electronic manufacturing industry to reduce manufacturing cost, improve yield, and ensure product quality and reliability. This paper proposes two inspection modules for an automatic solder joint classification system. The front-end inspection system includes illumination normalisation, localisation and segmentation. The back-end inspection involves the classification of solder joints using the Log-Gabor filter and classifier fusion. Five different levels of solder quality with respect to the amount of solder paste have been defined. The Log-Gabor filter has been demonstrated to achieve high recognition rates and is resistant to misalignment. This proposed system does not need any special illumination system, and the images are acquired by an ordinary digital camera. This system could contribute to the development of automated non-contact, non-destructive and low cost solder joint quality inspection systems. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.