Automated extraction of PCB components based on specularity using layered illumination

This paper investigates the methodologies for locating and identifying components on a printed circuit board (PCB) used for surface mount device inspection. It's the foundation of other inspections, such as solder joint inspection, component type recognization and so on. The proposed scheme consists of two stages: solder joint extraction and protective coating extraction. This work uses automatic multilevel thresholding approach for detecting specular areas which contain solder joints. Some invalid specular areas, such as markings and via-holes are recognized and removed by comparing the colour distribution features of the target objects and the reference objects. A novel approach based on connection graph and the segmented gray-scale PCB images is developed to classify all recognized solder joints as several clusters. And then, the protective coating is extracted by the positions of the clustered solder joints. Experimental results show that the proposed method can recognize most of components effectively.