• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.11-15
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• 2020

In a typical initial setup of a PCB component inspection system, operators should manually input various information such as category, position, and inspection area for each component to be inspected, thus causing much inconvenience and longer setup time. Although there are many deep learning based object detectors, RetinaNet is regarded as one of best object detectors currently available. In this paper, a method using an extended RetinaNet is proposed that automatically detects its component category and position for each component mounted on PCBs from a high-resolution color input image. We extended the basic RetinaNet feature pyramid network by adding a feature pyramid layer having higher spatial resolution to the basic feature pyramid. It was demonstrated by experiments that the extended RetinaNet can detect successfully very small components that could be missed by the basic RetinaNet. Using the proposed method could enable automatic generation of inspection areas, thus considerably reducing the setup time of PCB component inspection systems.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.16 no.11
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• pp.1089-1095
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• 2010

We propose an image segmentation method for auto-teaching system of PCB (Printed Circuit Board) assembly inspection machines. The inspection machine acquires images of all components in PCB, and then compares each image with its standard image to find the assembly errors such as misalignment, inverse polarity, and tombstone. The component window that is the area of component to be acquired by camera, is one of the teaching data for operating the inspection machines. To reduce the teaching time of the machine, we newly develop the image processing method to extract the component window automatically from the image of PCB. The proposed method segments the component window by excluding the soldering parts as well as board background. We binarize the input image by use of HSI color model because it is difficult to discriminate the RGB colors between components and backgrounds. The linear combination of the binarized images then enhances the component window from the background. By use of the horizontal and vertical projection of histogram, we finally obtain the component widow. The experimental results are presented to verify the usefulness of the proposed method.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.61 no.3
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• pp.472-478
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• 2012

The inspection machine in PCB (printed circuit board) assembly line checks assembly errors by inspecting the images inside of the component inspection region. The component inspection region consists of region of component package and region of soldering. It is necessary to extract the regions automatically for auto-teaching system of the inspection machine. We propose an image segmentation method to extract the component inspection regions automatically from images of PCB. The acquired image is transformed to HSI color model, and then segmented by several regions by clustering method. We develop a modified K-means algorithm to increase the accuracy of extraction. The heuristics generating the initial clusters and merging the final clusters are newly proposed. The vertical and horizontal projection is also developed to distinguish the region of component package and region of soldering. The experimental results are presented to verify the usefulness of the proposed method.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.9-18
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• 1998

The components with J-lead. which are more integrated and smaller than ones with Gull-wing. are rapidly being used in electronic board such as the PCB, for they have the advantage of occupying a small space compared to the other components. However, the development of inspection system for these new components is not so rapid as component development. Component-inspection with J-lead using vision system is difficult because they are hidden from camera optical axis. X-ray inspection, which has the advantage of inspecting the inside of solder state, is used to J-lead inspection. However. it is high cost and dangerous by leaking out X-ray compared to vision system. Therefore, in this paper, we design vision system suited to J-lead inspection and then propose algorithm which have flexibility in mount and rand error.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.24 no.8
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• pp.988-999
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• 2021

AOI (Automatic Optical Inspection) of PCB (Printed Circuit Board) is a very important step to guarantee the product performance. The process of registering components called teaching mode is first perform, and AOI is then carried out in a testing mode that checks defects, such as recognizing and comparing the component mounted on the PCB to the stored components. Since most of registration of the components on the PCB is done manually, it takes a lot of time and there are many problems caused by mistakes or misjudgement. In this paper, A components classifier is proposed using YOLO (You Only Look Once) v2's object detection model that can automatically register components in teaching modes to reduce dramatically time and mistakes. The network of YOLO is modified to classify small objects, and the number of anchor boxes was increased from 9 to 15 to classify various types and sizes. Experimental results show that the proposed method has a good performance with 99.86% accuracy.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.113-118
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• 2011

This paper proposes computer visual inspection algorithms for PCB defects which are found in a manufacturing process. The proposed method can detect open circuit and short circuit on bare PCB without using any reference images. It performs adaptive threshold processing for the ROI (Region of Interest) of a target image, median filtering to remove noises, and then analyzes connected components of the binary image. In this paper, the connected components of circuit pattern are defined as 6 types. The proposed method classifies the connected components of the target image into 6 types, and determines an unclassified component as a defect of the circuit. The analysis of the original target image detects open circuits, while the analysis of the complement image finds short circuits. The machine vision inspection system is implemented using C language in an embedded Linux system for a high-speed real-time image processing. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithms are quite successful.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 1996.10b
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• pp.605-608
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• 1996

The aim of this thesis is to develop a SMT-components placement inspection system equipped with a visual sensor. The visual sensor, which consists of a camera and 2-layer LED illuminator, developed to inspect the component placement state such as missing, shift, flipping, polarity and tomb-stone. on PCB in the reflow-process. In practical applications, however, it is too hard to classify component from images mixed pad on PCB, cream solder paste and component. To overcome the problem, this thesis proposes the 2-layer illumination method and the heuristic image processing algorithms according to inspection type. To show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a series of experiments on the inspection were conducted. The results show that the proposed method is robust to visual noise and variations in component conditions.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.20 no.11
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• pp.23-31
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• 2003

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.5 no.3
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• pp.353-362
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• 1999

This paper presents a shape reconstruction method for automatic inspection of the solder joints on PCBs using X-ray. Shape reconstruction from X-ray radiographic image has been very important since X-ray equipment was used for improving the reliability of inspection result. For this purpose there have been lots of previous works using tomography, which reconstructs the correct shape, laminography or tomosynthesis, which are very fast algorithm. Latter two methods show outstanding performance in cross-sectional image reconstruction of lead type component, but they are also known to show some fatal limitations to some kinds of components such as BGA, because of shadow effect. Although conventional tomography does not have any shadow effect, the shape of PCB prohibits it from being applied to shape reconstruction of solder joints on PCB. This paper shows that tomography using Iterative Reconstruction Technique(IRT) can be applied to this difficult problem without any limitations. This makes conventional radiographic instrument used for shape reconstruction without shadow effect. This means that the new method makes cost down and shadow-free shape reconstruction. To verify the effectiveness of IRT, we develop three dimensional model of BGA solder ball, make projection model to obtain X-ray projection data. and perform a simulation study of shape reconstruction. To compare the performance of IRT with that of conventional laminography or tomosynthesis, reconstruction data are reorganized and error analysis between the original model are also performed.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.225-230
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• 2009

We propose a template matching method for component inspection of SMD assembly system. To discriminate wrong assembled components, the input image of component is matched with its standard image by template matching algorithm. For a fast inspection system, the calculation time of matching algorithm should be reduced. Since the standard images of all components located in a PCB are stored in computer, it is desirable to reduce the memory size of standard image. We apply the discrete wavelet transformation to reduce the image size as well as the calculation time. Only 7% memory of the BMP image is used to discriminate goodness or badness of components assembly. Comparative results are presented to verify the usefulness of the proposed method.