A Reliable Ensemble Model based on Hierarchical Component Features for Repair Label Prediction of Soldering Defects

Using solder paste inspection (SPI) and automated optical inspection (AOI) data, accurate prediction for repair labels of soldering defective printed circuit board (PCB) components can help reduce labor costs. Existing research tries to pick out both the false defect components (actually good) and impossible-to-repair components among defective PCB components, using SPI and AOI data. However, it is inappropriate to pick out the false defect components from screened components using defective information in AOI data. Therefore, the problem setting of existing research is inappropriate, resulting in the algorithm's performance not meeting actual requirements. To address this problem, we only care about the reliable prediction of impossible-to-repair components. We propose a hierarchical component feature extraction method that can comprehensively characterize the degree of component defects from multiple levels, including pin level and component level. Then we apply the ensemble model based on XGBoost and TabNet and adjust the probability threshold of components judged as impossible-to-repair category, achieving the reliable prediction of impossible-to-repair components. Finally, we validated our method on real datasets and achieved better experimental results compared to baseline methods, which can meet actual requirements,