PCBNet: A Lightweight Convolutional Neural Network for Defect Inspection in Surface Mount Technology

Prereflow automatic optical inspection (AOI) has been widely used to ensure product quality in surface mount technology (SMT). When confronted with a complex industrial environment, traditional hand-designed visual inspection algorithms may lack robustness and generalizability. In this article, PCBNet, a convolutional neural network (CNN) method that combines data preprocessing, detection network, and visualization, is proposed to localize electronic components and recognize defects. In the data preprocessing stage, raw images are segmented into several regions of interest (ROIs). The ROI patches are inspected by a CNN-based detection system, which is capable of classifying defects and positioning components. After inspection, the reporting system visualizes the results via the human–computer interface. In comparative studies, the effectiveness of the proposed PCBNet was validated on a large-scale PCB component defect dataset. The PCBNet backbone outperforms other well-known lightweight CNN backbones in terms of accuracy and latency on $4\times $ ARM Cortex A72 CPU @ 1.5 GHz. Compared to other learning-based methods on the small-scale benchmark dataset, the PCBNet also achieves the best balance between inference speed and accuracy. In addition, extensive experiments demonstrate the superior efficiency of PCBNet in comparison to some famous traditional object detectors and novel oriented object detection algorithms.