Automatic Industry PCB Board DIP Process Defect Detection with Deep Ensemble Method

The conventional PCB (Printed Circuit Board) DIP (Dual Inline Package) process solder defect detection was done by labor inspection, which is not only time-intensive but also labor-intensive. This paper proposes a deep ensemble method to inspect the PCB solder defects to replace the labor inspection. To achieve a high detection rate and a low false alarm rate, two distinct detection models, a hybrid YOLOv2 (YOLOv2 as a foreground detector and ResNet-101 as a classifier) and Faster RCNN with ResNet-101 and FPN are separately trained to obtain a high detection rate result. The final ensemble model aggregates the result from the two detection models. That achieves a 96.73% detection rate and a 19.73% false alarm rate in real tests. The detection time is less than 15 seconds for inferencing a PCB image with a resolution of 7296*6000. The proposed method has been proven efficient in terms of guiding operators to identify and fix PCB solder defects [1] and thus is able to reduce 33% of labor demand for each PCB production line at our real test site. [1].