End-to-end deep learning framework for printed circuit board manufacturing defect classification

We report a complete deep-learning framework using a single-step object detection model in order to quickly and accurately detect and classify the types of manufacturing defects present on Printed Circuit Board (PCBs). We describe the complete model architecture and compare with the current state-of-the-art using the same PCB defect dataset. These benchmark methods include the Faster Region Based Convolutional Neural Network (FRCNN) with ResNet50, RetinaNet, and You-Only-Look-Once (YOLO) for defect detection and identification. Results show that our method achieves a 98.1% mean average precision(mAP[IoU = 0.5]) on the test samples using low-resolution images. This is 3.2% better than the state-of-the-art using low-resolution images (YOLO V5m) and 1.4% better than the state-of-the-art using high-resolution images (FRCNN-ResNet FPN). While achieving better accuracies, our model also requires roughly 3× fewer model parameters (7.02M) compared with the state-of-the-art FRCNN-ResNet FPN (23.59M) and YOLO V5m (20.08M). In most cases, the major bottleneck of the PCB manufacturing chain is quality control, reliability testing and manual rework of defective PCBs. Based on the initial results, we firmly believe that implementing this model on a PCB manufacturing line could significantly increase the production yield and throughput, while dramatically reducing manufacturing costs.