Automated Visual Inspection System for Printed Circuit Boards for Small Series Production

Abstract

There is a crescent need to produce Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) in a customized and efficient way, therefore, there is an effort from the scientific and industrial community to improve image processing techniques for PCB inspection. The methods proposed at this chapter aim the formation of a system to inspect SMD (Surface Mounted Devices) components in a SSP (Small Series Production), ensuring a satisfactory production quality. This way, a 3-step inspection system is proposed, formed by image preprocessing, feature extraction and evaluation components, based on characteristics related to shape, positioning and histogram of the component. The inspection machine used in this project is inserted in a cooperation among machines context, in order to provide a fully autonomous factory, coordinated by a multi-agent system. Experimental obtained results show that the proposed inspection system is suitable for the case, reaching a success rate above 89% when using actual components.