• 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 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.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.335-349
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• 2023

Bridges constantly undergo deterioration and damage, the most common ones being concrete damage and exposed rebar. Periodic inspection of bridges to identify damages can aid in their quick remediation. Likewise, identifying components can provide context for damage assessment and help gauge a bridge's state of interaction with its surroundings. Current inspection techniques rely on manual site visits, which can be time-consuming and costly. More recently, robotic inspection assisted by autonomous data analytics based on Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been viewed as a suitable alternative to manual inspection because of its efficiency and accuracy. To aid research in this avenue, this study performs a comparative assessment of different architectures, loss functions, and ensembling strategies for the autonomous segmentation of bridge components and damages. The experiments lead to several interesting discoveries. Nested Reg-UNet architecture is found to outperform five other state-of-the-art architectures in both damage and component segmentation tasks. The architecture is built by combining a Nested UNet style dense configuration with a pretrained RegNet encoder. In terms of the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) metric, the Nested Reg-UNet architecture provides an improvement of 2.86% on the damage segmentation task and 1.66% on the component segmentation task compared to the state-of-the-art UNet architecture. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that incorporating the Lovasz-Softmax loss function to counter class imbalance can boost performance by 3.44% in the component segmentation task over the most employed alternative, weighted Cross Entropy (wCE). Finally, weighted softmax ensembling is found to be quite effective when used synchronously with the Nested Reg-UNet architecture by providing mIoU improvement of 0.74% in the component segmentation task and 1.14% in the damage segmentation task over a single-architecture baseline. Overall, the best mIoU of 92.50% for the component segmentation task and 84.19% for the damage segmentation task validate the feasibility of these techniques for autonomous bridge component and damage segmentation using RGB images.

• 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 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.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Safety
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• v.17 no.3
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• pp.73-80
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• 2002

The RBI technique proposed by API is composed of three steps. The qualitative RBI method can be used for the purpose of screening the components with high risk. And the quantitative RBI method employs complex risk evaluation model for predicting component risk in a quantitative manner. The inspection program can be optimized based on the results obtained by these RBI technique. The forementioned RBI technique has been applied to a common hydrodesulfurizer unit and the technique is critically evaluated for studying its benefits and limitations, which is the main issue of this thesis. It's conducted that the RBI method can provide a method for defining and measuring the component risk, and also provide a powerful tool for managing many of the important elements of a process plant.

• Journal of Korean Society for Quality Management
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.88-95
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• 2005

Multistage screening is a common practice when a component has a critical effect on the function of the assembly. A defect in a component might incur malfunction of an electronic device, resulting in a great amount of loss. Multistage screening, including duplicated screening inspections, may provide a good solution for this problem when inspection errors are present. In the company studied here, the manufacturing process of the multiple layer chip capacitor includes two-stage screening. In the first stage, screening inspection is performed repeatedly until no defects are found in the lot. In the second stage, sampling inspection is performed by a group of experts prior to shipment. In this article, we review the procedure used in the field and suggest a revised model of the multiple screening procedure and solution method for this situation. The usefulness of the proposed model is discussed through a practical example.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.21 no.10
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• pp.982-987
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• 2015

The inspection machine in SMT (Surface Mount Technology) line detects the assembly defects such as missing, misalignment, loosing, or tombstone. We propose a new method to classify the defect types of chip components by processing the image of PCB. Two original images are obtained from horizontal lighting and vertical lighting. The image of the component is divided into two soldering regions and one packaging region. The features are extracted by appling the PCA (Principle Component Analysis) to each region. The MLP (Multilayer Perceptron) and SVM (Support Vector Machine) are then used to classify the defect types by learning. The experimental results are presented to show the usefulness of the proposed method.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.21 no.12
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• pp.125-130
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• 2016

Automatic quality inspection by computer vision can be applied and give a solution to the pharmaceutical industry field. Pharmaceutical capsule can be easily affected by flaws like dents, cracks, holes, etc. In order to solve the quality inspection problem, it is required computationally efficient image processing technique like thresholding, boundary edge detection and segmentation and some automated systems are available but they are very expensive to use. In this paper, we have developed a dented capsule image processing technique using edge-based image segmentation, TLS(Total Least Squares) curve fitting technique and adopted low cost camera module for capsule image capturing. We have tested and evaluated the accuracy, training and testing time of the classification recognition algorithms like PCA(Principal Component Analysis), ICA(Independent Component Analysis) and SVM(Support Vector Machine) to show the performance. With the result, PCA, ICA has low accuracy, but SVM has good accuracy to use for classifying the dented capsule.