Detection and Classification of Printed Circuit Boards Using YOLO Algorithm

Printed circuit boards (PCBs) are an indispensable part of every electronic device used today. With its computing power, it performs tasks in much smaller dimensions, but the process of making and sorting PCBs can be a challenge in PCB factories. One of the main challenges in factories that use robotic manipulators for “pick and place” tasks are object orientation because the robotic manipulator can misread the orientation of the object and thereby grasp it incorrectly, and for this reason, object segmentation is the ideal solution for the given problem. In this research, the performance, memory size, and prediction of the YOLO version 5 (YOLOv5) semantic segmentation algorithm are tested for the needs of detection, classification, and segmentation of PCB microcontrollers. YOLOv5 was trained on 13 classes of PCB images from a publicly available dataset that was modified and consists of 1300 images. The training was performed using different structures of YOLOv5 neural networks, while nano, small, medium, and large neural networks were used to select the optimal network for the given challenge. Additionally, the total dataset was cross validated using 5-fold cross validation and evaluated using mean average precision, precision, recall, and F1-score classification metrics. The results showed that large, computationally demanding neural networks are not required for the given challenge, as demonstrated by the YOLOv5 small model with the obtained mAP, precision, recall, and F1-score in the amounts of 0.994, 0.996, 0.995, and 0.996, respectively. Based on the obtained evaluation metrics and prediction results, the obtained model can be implemented in factories for PCB sorting applications.