Quality inspection of specific electronic boards by deep neural networks

Reliability and lifetime of specific electronics boards depends on the quality of manufacturing process. Especially soldering splashes in some areas of PCB (printed circuit board) can cause change of selected electrical parameters. Nowadays, the manual inspection is massively replaced by specialized visual systems checking the presence of different defects. The research carried out in this paper can be considered as industrial (industry requested) application of machine learning in automated object detection. Object of interest—solder splash—is characterized by its small area and similar properties (texture, color) as its surroundings. The aim of our research was to apply state-of-the art algorithms based on deep neural networks for detection such objects in relatively complex electronic board. The research compared seven different object detection models based on you-look-only-once (YOLO) and faster region based convolutional neural network architectures. Results show that our custom trained YOLOv8n detection model with 1.9 million parameters can detect solder splashes with low detection speed 90 ms and 96.6% mean average precision. Based on these results, the use of deep neural networks can be useful for early detection of solder splashes and potentially lead to higher productivity and cost savings.