Soldering defect detection in automatic optical inspection

This paper proposes an integrated detection framework of solder joint defects in the context of Automatic Optical Inspection (AOI) of Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs). Both localization and classifications tasks were considered. For the localization part, in contrast to the existing methods that are highly specified for particular PCBs, we used a generic deep learning method which can be easily ported to different configurations of PCBs and soldering technologies and also gives real-time speed and high accuracy. For the classification part, an active learning method was proposed to reduce the labeling workload when a large labeled training database is not easily available because it requires domain-specified knowledge. The experiments show that the localization method is fast and accurate. In addition, high accuracy with only minimal user input was achieved in the classification framework on two different datasets. The results also demonstrated that our method outperforms three other active learning benchmarks.