A Hybrid Method of Frequency and Spatial Domain Techniques for TFT-LCD Circuits Defect Detection

Defect detection is a crucial but challenging task in thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) manufacturing. Existing vision-based methods focus on either spatial domain or frequency domain with unsatisfactory detection. In view of that, this paper proposes a hybrid template matching method by drawing benefits from both frequency and spatial domain techniques. Under proposal, frequency domain template matching method and saliency detector method are firstly adopted separately to obtain two candidate frequency components associated with defects. In template matching process, a novel selection criterion is taken to improve identifying components associated with local spatial anomaly. Subsequently, the inverse Fourier transform is applied on the intersection of the two candidates to reconstruct the defect regions. In final steps, image entropy in the spatial domain is employed to filter out false detection regions to improve accuracy. To meet industry’s real-time inspection requirement, image partition and multi-threading calculation techniques are introduced into the proposed methodology. Experimental results have shown practical viability of the proposed approach to increase the yield rate of panels through robust defect detection in TFT-LCD manufacturing.