• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.5
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• pp.111-120
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• 2016

Wire recognition is one of the important tasks in chip reverse engineering since connectivity comes from wires. Recognized wires are used to recover logical or functional representation of the corresponding circuit. Though manual recognition provides accurate results, it becomes impossible, as the number of wires is more than hundreds of thousands. Wires on a chip usually have specific intensity or color characteristics since they are made of specific materials. This paper proposes two stage wire recognition scheme; image binarization and then the process of determining whether regions in binary image are wires or not. We employ existing techniques for two processes. Since the second process requires the characteristics of wires, the users needs to select the typical wire region in the given image. The histogram characteristic of the selected region is used in calculating histogram similarity between the typical wire region and the other regions. The first experiment is to select the most appropriate binarization scheme for the second process. The second experiment on the second process compares three proposed methods employing histogram similarity of grayscale or HSV color since there have not been proposed any wire recognition method comparable by experiment. The best method shows more than 98% of true positive rate for 25 test examples.