Low-Cost Real-Time Automated Optical Inspection Using Deep Learning and Attention Map

The recent trends in Industry 4.0 and Internet of Things have encour-aged many factory managers to improve inspection processes to achieve automa-tion and high detection rates.However,the corresponding cost results of sample tests are still used for quality control.A low-cost automated optical inspection system that can be integrated with production lines to fully inspect products with-out adjustments is introduced herein.The corresponding mechanism design enables each product to maintain afixed position and orientation during inspec-tion to accelerate the inspection process.The proposed system combines image recognition and deep learning to measure the dimensions of the thread and iden-tify its defects within 20 s,which is lower than the production-line productivity per 30 s.In addition,the system is designed to be used for monitoring production lines and equipment status.The dimensional tolerance of the proposed system reaches 0.012 mm,and a 100%accuracy is achieved in terms of the defect reso-lution.In addition,an attention-based visualization approach is utilized to verify the rationale for the use of the convolutional neural network model and identify the location of thread defects.

Industry-Oriented Detection Method of PCBA Defects Using Semantic Segmentation Models

Automated optical inspection(AOI)is a significant process in printed circuit board assembly(PCBA)production lines which aims to detect tiny defects in PCBAs.Existing AOI equipment has several deficiencies including low throughput,large computation cost,high latency,and poor flexibility,which limits the efficiency of online PCBA inspection.In this paper,a novel PCBA defect detection method based on a lightweight deep convolution neural network is proposed.In this method,the semantic segmentation model is combined with a rule-based defect recognition algorithm to build up a defect detection frame-work.To improve the performance of the model,extensive real PCBA images are collected from production lines as datasets.Some optimization methods have been applied in the model according to production demand and enable integration in lightweight computing devices.Experiment results show that the production line using our method realizes a throughput more than three times higher than traditional methods.Our method can be integrated into a lightweight inference system and pro-mote the flexibility of AOI.The proposed method builds up a general paradigm and excellent example for model design and optimization oriented towards industrial requirements.

Integrated Inspection of QoM, QoP, and QoS for AOI Industries in Metaverses

With the rapid development of information technologies such as digital twin, extended reality, and blockchain,the hype around "metaverse" is increasing at astronomical speed. However, much attention has been paid to its entertainment and social functions. Considering the openness and interoperability of metaverses, the market of quality inspection promises explosive growth. In this paper, taking advantage of metaverses, we first propose the concept of Automated Quality Inspection(Auto QI), which performs integrated inspection covering the entire manufacturing process, including Quality of Materials, Quality of Manufacturing(Qo M), Quality of Products, Quality of Processes(Qo P), Quality of Systems, and Quality of Services(Qo S). Based on the scenarios engineering theory, we discuss how to perform interactions between metaverses and the physical world for virtual design instruction and physical validation feedback. Then we introduce a bottomup inspection device development workflow with productivity tools offered by metaverses, making development more effective and efficient than ever. As the core of quality inspection,we propose Quality Transformers to complete detection task,while federated learning is integrated to regulate data sharing.In summary, we point out the development directions of quality inspection under metaverse tide.

Improving accuracy of automatic optical inspection with machine learning

Electronic devices require the printed circuit board(PCB)to support the whole structure,but the assembly of PCBs suffers from welding problem of the electronic components such as surface mounted devices(SMDs)resistors.The automated optical inspection(AOI)machine,widely used in industrial production,can take the image of PCBs and examine the welding issue.However,the AOI machine could commit false negative errors and dedicated technicians have to be employed to pick out those misjudged PCBs.This paper proposes a machine learning based method to improve the accuracy of AOI.In particular,we propose an adjacent pixel RGB value based method to pre-process the image from the AOI machine and build a customized deep learning model to classify the image.We present a practical scheme including two machine learning procedures to mitigate AOI errors.We conduct experiments with the real dataset from a production line for three months,the experimental results show that our method can reduce the rate of misjudgment from 0.3%–0.5%to 0.02%–0.03%,which is meaningful for thousands of PCBs each containing thousands of electronic components in practice.